I’m looking at this picture, and having some inchoate thoughts about photography. That perhaps its peculiar appeal and also its danger are about the fact that it makes composition invisible. I think you could make the somewhat dumbed-down analogy of the present:photography::the past:painting, and all that would remain to be explicated is the single colon—that [...]

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Tino Sehgal’s show at the Guggenheim is the sort of thing that tends to put me on my guard. It has the whiff of emperor’s-new-clothes about it. It’s very susceptible to the my-kid-could-paint-that school of contemporary art skepticism, and performance art is so often not my cup of tea, and there’s a lot of buzz. [...]

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I do not buy it. I did buy a ticket to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum–stood in line for half an hour and everything, given that it was the show’s last day–but the show wants you to buy so much more: Louis Vuitton handbags and stuffed smiling flowers and all sorts of tiny [...]

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The other day, there was one loafer on the floor of my office lobby. A lonely loafer, respectable brownish-black leather, bright red on the inside. The first thing I thought: “Who lost one bright-red-inside loafer in the lobby, and how?” The second: “Now, that could be some great office-lobby art.” Seriously, though: one loafer, bright [...]

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7Eleven Gallery is open only for the summer: it’s donated space, curated by three daughters of the art world (one of whom, full disclosure-ily, is my cousin). The opening exhibit is composed in substantial part of works by their personal friends. With all this vague nepotism, one might expect that the art would be nothing [...]

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There is new art in my office lobby. It is bad art. It is office-lobby art. It is the kind of office-lobby art that makes me wonder if there are factories producing bad art for office lobbies the world over (are there? does anybody know?). Perhaps there is a town in, like, New Hampshire with [...]

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Ick. Aside from the fact that the project described above sounds pretty gross, I have a problem with art that intends to “provoke discussion” without actually having anything to say. If this project does have anything to say, its creator does not seem to know what it is: The goal in creating the art exhibition, [...]

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