View current page
...more recent posts
I am going to see this show later today--Mark Dagley (left images) and Don Voisine (right images) at McKenzie Fine Art, 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea. It's the last day of the exhibit, sad to say. An earlier post on Dagley is here. This current show with Voisine is reviewed in the New York Sun--nice, but I wouldn't stop with physical analysis of the work. Doesn't it look like Voisine is censoring his own paintings?
Update: one invigorating thing about the Dagleys in person is the Stella-esque what-you-see-is-what-you-see quality. The bottom one has a white ground and each line is a thick painted stripe connecting two points. The top one is thousands of circles drawn by hand in pencil and then filled in. It's a weird combination of cabalistic arcana, prison art, and the Bauhaus. As much as I enjoyed Marc Handelman's show at Sikkema Jenkins (a Bleckneresque young Turk out of Columbia who has all the advantages of art world virginity) it seemed flashy and overeager to please compared to Dagley's work, which is dazzling yet unassuming, and not as conservative as our two world weary critics might consider it (you know who I mean). As for the Voisine, Mark used the word redaction in the comments and that is the first thing the black bars bring to mind, even though in person you see a play of edges and surfaces in all those blacks. I'm personally not uncomfortable with references to office/bureaucratic culture in art and feel like the self-cancellation of those Xs and black bars gives the work an interesting psychological edge, though it was probably not intended--the paintings are handsome and thoughtful but serious about the rhetoric of painting.
The panelists for an upcoming College Art Association discussion on "Emerging Artists, Critics, and the Market" are Jeffrey Deitch, Don and Mira Rubell, Peter Plagens, and Jerry Saltz. According to an email from AICA, the critics' association organizing the event at the Hilton on Feb 17, among the questions to be addressed are:
In the current situation what, indeed, is the critic’s role and responsibility? Are there opportunities? Are there ways to respond and to act that circumvent the conventions of build-a-reputation/trash-a-reputation? What is the relationship between collectors and dealers? How does it work? Why do art world systems go unanalyzed and uncritiqued by most critics? Is there room for critics to deepen the discourse? If so how? Does it make a difference if critics expose the issues within the market, art-making and criticism? Is anyone listening? Can dealers, collectors and artists listen to critics or only to one another? Is there anything critics learn from collectors and dealers? Does it matter? Are artists so caught up in the dazzle and anxiety of early success that they can’t hear what they have to know or should a critic attempt to reach them with reasoned argument?
I quit going to these types of panels after a prominent critic told me "we can't discuss specific artists because collectors will rush out and buy them up." Here is an alternative set of questions:
1. What new forms of art have emerged since the '70s? Who are the best artists working today?
2. Have we had a "brain drain" in the art world since the days when Leo Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss, and Craig Owens wrote about their contemporaries (i.e. since about 1982)?
3. Is the art world's dedication to a relative handful of canonical (i.e., marketable) artists comparable to the "copyright tyranny" of Disney and other large corporations?
4. Won't blogging and other forms of online writing largely replace print criticism in the near future? (The publisher of the New York Times seems to think so.) How will that change art practice?
Update: Added Timesman's prognostication and link.