The Art of Critical Spinning
The Art of Looking (Basic Books, 2018) by art critic Lance Esplund—a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, among other prestigious publications—is yet another of countless attempts to reconcile the public to the bizarre inventions of the avant-garde.1 A more fitting title would be “The Art of Critical Spinning.” Subtitled How to Read Modern […]
What’s Wrong with Today’s Protest Art?
What’s wrong with today’s “protest art”—which occupies so much of our public space? Mainly this: it’s long on protest and virtually devoid of art. That sad fact has been vividly demonstrated of late by two New York exhibitions: Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (closed January 7 at the Guggenheim) and An […]
A Toilet Is a Toilet Is a Toilet
Marcel Duchamp’s signed urinal dubbed Fountain isn’t a work of art, “conceptual” or otherwise.1 Neither is Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet dubbed America (offered on loan by the Guggenheim Museum to the White House last year, in lieu of a painting by Vincent van Gogh that had been requested). They are mere artworld stunts. Isn’t it […]
Duchamp or the Baroness?—What Difference Does It Make?
Is the infamous urinal signed “R. Mutt” (featured as the centerpiece on the cover of Who Says That’s Art?) really the brainchild of Marcel Duchamp, as the artworld has long claimed? Or was it instead merely a copy by him of a piece originally created by a relatively obscure figure of the early twentieth-century avant-garde—a […]