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Review: "Architecture of Life at BAMPFA" My take on the extravagantly poetic exhibition curated by Larry Rinder to open the new Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archives, published on Square Cylinder, February 2016.
Category Archives: Art Writing
Ask not what AI can do for art…but what art can do for AI
This short picture-essay was a provocation for the “AI and Art” panel organized by Piero Scaruffi for the Codame Art + Tech Festival curated by Vanessa Chang, which took place at The Midway in San Francisco, 7 June 2018. The … Continue reading
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Tagged AI, Codame, Frank Stella, Janelle Shane, Kim Stanley Robinson, Marcel Duchamp, robot
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Art & Shadows Update
Art & Shadows was made possible by the support of a generous one-year Art Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, administered by Creative Capital. Writing the blog was a wonderfully generative period that seeded several projects now coming to … Continue reading
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Who is Your Gail Wight?
The Abandon Videos This is an odd time to be thinking about a dead leaf. Our songbird neighbors are turning up the volume and, in his impatience for love, our local skunk, normally a nocturnal fellow, has been scrambling up … Continue reading
Dark Skies and Slow Thinking
Almost a year ago, I walked into an evening in the Canadian Rockies, disguised as a small installation space at UCLA’s Art|Sci Center gallery. It was a peculiar experience—how could it be that this windowless room held a mountain evening? … Continue reading
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Tagged Adam Gazzaley, bottom-up processing, Dark Skies, Patricia Olynyk, top-down modulation, UCLA ArtSci Center
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I predict…
A couple of posts ago I wrote something snarky about Freud, which he himself did not deserve. A great thinker, he’s entitled to his museums. But while clambering over the heaps of theory built on his work one might be forgiven … Continue reading
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Tagged Jompet Kuswidananto, Sigmund Freud, Yinka Shonibare, Yto Barrada
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Truth, Beauty, and the Digital Way
Once upon a time I saw the art critic Dave Hickey defend beauty. At the time, mid-1990s, he was both famous and notorious for The Invisible Dragon, a book of essays in which he attacked the art world for neglecting … Continue reading
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Tagged Carolyn Kristov-Bakargiev, Dave Hickey, knowledge, Massimiliano Gioni, Yuko Hasegawa
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Ghosts in the Machine, III
Pre-amble If we were to catalog our age by its temptations, surely it would be called “The Age of Dreams”—and not because we’re sleeping well. Our big vice is the small screen, or so it seems to me when I … Continue reading
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Tagged Ghosts in the Machine, Marguerite Wertheim, Massimiliano Gioni, Movie-Drome, Robert Rauschenberg, Stan VanDerBeek
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Ghosts in the Machine II
Remote Viewing Living in this “global” art world, I think quite a lot about exhibitions that I will never see. I read catalogs, and look at websites, and talk to people who made it to Kassel, or Havana, or Gwangju. … Continue reading
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Tagged Getulio Alviani, Ghost in the Machine, Grazia Varisco, New Museum, Philip Linhares, Richard Hamilton
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Ghosts in the Machine
The Elaborately Signaled Landscape of Desire You don’t have to be human very long to know that there are desires that are explicable and then there are the other kind. Sometimes we are indifferent to “good things” and intensely drawn … Continue reading
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Tagged art and technology, attribution theory, behavioral priming, cognitive dissonance, Crash, Ghosts in the Machine, Harley Cokeliss, J.G. Ballard, mirror neurons, New Museum, self-perception theory
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Arranging Ideas
As I prepare to present art to audiences who may or may not care for my comments (sometimes referred to as “teaching art history”), I occasionally play with thinking of the lecture as a flower arrangement. The key works, the … Continue reading
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Tagged A Day Made of Glass, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Bruce Tognazzini, Corning, Maria Mitchell, Philip Benn, Starfire
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