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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Wearing Black

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

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

Every Town, Its Arts Center

IT USED TO BE “A CHICKEN IN EVERY POT.” Today, the rallying cry is more like “Every town, its own art center.” How else can we grow into informed, sensitive, environmentally caring and gender-free citizens without art? Without the ministrations and musings of Those Who Know? Without the comfort of art to compensate for our unemployment? Ask Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A prosperous metropolis at the turn of the 20th century, it was a naitonal center for the manufacture of woolens. It had thriving mills that produced grist, lumber, paper and textiles. Continue Reading
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