Once upon a time, in the mid-’90s, contemporary art and more academic fine art were still on good terms in Japan. Mono-ha and abstraction were living traditions, allowing artists to wax metaphoric about materials and process without sounding precious. Grand philosophical themes like mankind’s relationship to nature and technology were mused upon expansively. Art was humanist, and without a market or much of an audience. Then came the callow mirth of Superflat, which needed a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown to occur before it could put on a socially concerned face. Only now, after five years of post-disaster anxiety and weariness with the easy “interventionist” art that proliferated after 2011, are people willing to reconsider a romantic like Yamaguchi Keisuke.

The Toyota Municipal Museum of Art must have sensed that visiting Yama...Read more

In a small photograph included in “David Hammons: Five Decades,” the first authorized David Hammons retrospective in twenty-five years, the artist can be seen seated, chin in hand, exhibiting a composure that might lead one to overlook the fact that the elegant chair beneath him is missing its front legs. With his dark shades, crossed legs, and nonchalance toward his apparent balancing act, Hammons is the embodiment of cool contemplation. It was with the same poise that the rest of the work in this long-awaited, artist-conceived exhibition inhabited Mnuchin Gallery, filling two stories of the Upper East Side town house with a subtle menace and a set of social concerns that the neighborhood’s brass-handled doors and iron gates seem designed to keep out. 

Hammons’s works often defy thematic generalizations; however, one of th...Read more

A gaudy pink-plexiglass wheelchair and four photos of a cheeky young woman about to spit out brightly colored Lego bricks currently greet visitors to Verbund’s Vienna headquarters (where, in the publicly accessible foyer, stairwell, and corridors, the Austrian utilities company regularly showcases its art collection). These are among the roughly forty works by the seldom-exhibited artist Renate Bertlmann (b. 1943) that constitute her first major exhibition in her home country. The show, which spans from the early 1970s to the mid-’80s (Bertlmann’s most prolific years), includes installations, films, photographs, drawings, and scores for performances. 

When Bertlmann first started out as an artist, her unique, witty work drew harsh criticism from other feminists for its use of sex toys and (hetero)sexually explicit imagery. She wa...Read more

Type “Los Angeles” into the search box of iStockphoto.com and you will see over seventy thousand images, many of which look very much the same. For the works in a recent exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, Alex Israel spent what must have been many grueling hours scouring the database, finally selecting a group of images that distill the clichés underwriting the romantic fantasy that—for some—is Los Angeles. He then UV-printed the photos on large panoramic canvases, with words by Bret Easton Ellis, his collaborator for the show, displayed across them.

The images—of palm fronds casting shadows on pink-painted stucco, for instance, or the seemingly endless, twinkling panorama seen at night from the hills—are the kind that Hollywood exports to the world in movies and commercial advertising. Such images embod...Read more