Art in America - Most Recent Editor's Homepage Posts

Homepage New Orleans Prospects

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:10:00 +0100

I’d like to believe that New Orleans stands a chance of escaping the fate of Venice. In that spirit, I wish Prospect.2 every success. But I really can’t wait to see Prospect.2.5.

Homepage: Michelangelo and Ugo Eye to Eye

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:00:00 +0100

"MICHELANGELO EYE TO EYE" is the English title given to the final work of Michelangelo Antonioni, a brief documentary of 2004 in which the frail, 92-year-old director communes with his namesake's great carved figure of Moses. This month brings a more mediated but nonetheless suggestive encounter between two Michelangelos: the publication by Steidl of Antonioni's Blow-Up, a monograph on the landmark film with trim, penetrating essays by Philippe Garner and David Alan Mellor, and the opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of the deeply researched retrospective "Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974," curated by Carlos Basualdo.

Sculpture Under The Influence

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 14:00:00 +0100

Not that Calder ever sank into obscurity. Pace Gallery has shown his work faithfully since the mid-1980s; his Circus was on seemingly eternal view in the Whitney Museum lobby.

Home Page: Memory Aids

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0100

Prompted by the June opening of the sixth Berlin Biennale, I traveled to the city for the first time-unfashionably late, I know. Opening the catalogue at the preview, I found a schematic street map indicating the Biennale's six far-flung venues, from KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the event's birthplace in the Mitte, to four ad hoc locations in the Kreuzberg district plus the Alte Nationalgalerie on Museum Insel, where an exhibition of drawings by the 19th-century artist Adolph Menzel was meant to buttress the Biennale's theme of contemporary realism.

Your Own Personal Jesus

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:30:00 +0100

The New York art community has been gathering for a spate of panels and programs on museum practices, all prompted by two concurrent exhibitions that could not be more dissimilar. At the Museum of Modern Art is “Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist is Present” [through May 31], a chronologically ordered retrospective of four decades of performance and its documentation, with a new piece ongoing in the museum’s giant fishbowl of an atrium, where the charismatic artist is seated silently at a table for what will amount to some 700 hours

Livin' Le Vide Loco

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0100

The museum’s ground floor presented only an entwining couple moving slowly through a sequence of upright and recumbent poses. You might have recognized a brief tableau vivant of Klimt’s mosaic kiss or Brancusi’s stone kiss, or detected in the detachment of the embraces something of Warhol’s filmed kisses.

Making it

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:03:00 +0100

Action Painting/Motion Pictures

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Commercial movies have long been the foil and fodder for artists working with video and film. By comparison, few have found anything of interest in the history of painting.

Who's on Fourth?

Marcia E. Vetrocq — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

We introduce a monthly commentary by the editor.