Culture Cues

Saturday Bits

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THIS SEEMS A GOOD TIME to say a word of thanks to those of you—you brave few—who take time to email with your own names. I am glad to have them, glad for that brief moment where the curtain of anonymity gets pulled back. It delights me to know that there are real people behind the pen names almost everyone uses. But why is there is so much reluctance to using a real name on a blog like this? It is so totally nonthreatening. Continue Reading
Wearing Black

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WE DO ALL WEAR BLACK, DON’T WE? And it is not just artists. A ride on the New York City subways testifies to that. But for the logos on hats and jackets, we all look like Chelsea undertakers or Portuguese widows. Why bother looking for the new black? The old one is just fine, and the oldest pigment known to man. Carbon black, bone black, ivory black, mars black, peach black, vine black—by whatever name, it does not show the dirt. Continue Reading
Miscellany

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HEDDY ABRAMOWITZ REPORTED EARLIER on an exhibition in Jerusalem that centered on the work of Francis Cunningham and several students. Her conclusion—a regretful one—was that there is no telling what road a student might take. Some embrace their training, put it to work and build upon it. Others discard it to follow their bliss. It is this second group that reminds me of a story Donald Kuspit once told. A few years after graduating from art school at Stony Brook, one former student in his art history class called him up. Continue Reading
Fashion For Erudition

THERE WAS A TIME, NOT LONG AGO, when fashion began in the fingers of individuals gifted with a sense of style and the moxie to make something of it. Not any more. Now, aspiring fashionistas have to draw on their parents’ retirement income, take out loans and subject themselves to degree programs in fashion studies. The old Parsons School of Design, now a division of The New School, has extended its name. In the 1970s it became Parsons The New School for Design. Continue Reading
Dodging the Sacred

MODERNITY OFFERS SECULARISTS TWO SEDUCTIVE HEDGES: aestheticism and Buddhism. New York’s Rubin Museum yokes them together in a pictorial fantasia on the New Age-y theme of universal spirituality. No divisive truth claims mar the view from the $100 million monument to Multi-Plan founder Donald Rubin’s own purchasing power and those acquisitive cravings that Buddhist doctrine decries. All contradictions and irreconcilable differences disperse in the solvent of art appreciation, that distinctly Western ideology at the heart of museum culture. Embodying the Holy: Icons in Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism is a visually splendid, conceptually shallow, exhibition. Continue Reading