Culture Vultures
The US government has been relentless in its assault on contemporary art by privileging all things patriotic by Nancy Spector
When I received a gold-engraved card from the White House inviting me to a reception to launch the administration’s new Global Cultural Initiative, I thought at first that it must have been an art-world prank – perhaps a tactical media intervention by the Critical Art Ensemble. But then I...
 
Bright Lights Big Cavity
Social events in the art world can result in a sense of disorientation that has little to do with the wine by Robert Storr
A queasy morning. I’m out of training. How soon one forgets the rigours of party-going. For 20 years, openings, cocktails and dinners were major components of my working and playing life; for the 12 during which I worked as Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, I was out at least four...
 
Questionnaire: Rodney Graham
What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do? Being a rock star – hey wait a minute I AM a rock star! What images keep you company in the space where you work? Pictures of the band Black Sabbath. I did a piece about them. If you could live with only one piece of art,...
 
Life in Film: Rebecca Warren
‘That was the day I stopped believing in the wild ardour of things. Perhaps in love … the love in books and films … that tells us to abandon our lives and plans all for one brief touch of Venus… The world just seems too fragile a place for it … Perhaps it’s just we who are too fragile.’
This is the wife talking in Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), (a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows, 1955), to her black gardener with whom a tender forbidden love is developing, as her husband descends into a hell of homosexual guilt. Haynes stays with Sirk’s post-war New...
 
Shop of the New
Zurich’s legendary Dada venue, Cabaret Voltaire, now includes a shop selling ‘Fair Trade’ T-shirts by Tirdad Zolghadr
For your next trip to Zurich consider a visit to the Cabaret Voltaire, mythical birth-place of Dada, where artists with pointy hats and thunderous nursery rhymes changed the course of art history. The venue is now an art space dedicated to a critical Dada makeover for today’s context, located...
 
Dumb and Dumber
Have visual rants been turned into jingles? by Robert Storr
Depending on which end of the telescope you look through, modern art has been a story either of boundless progress or of infinite regress. Actually it is both or neither until you subtract the hopeful or doom-laden adjectives added just to get us off to an apocalyptic start. Even then, the...
 
We Have Standards
Designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have curated an exhibition that celebrates the idea of the ‘Super Normal’ by Emily King
I recently bought a pair of jeans in the kind of shop that I wouldn’t have dreamt of buying jeans in a few years ago, before they became the potentially perfectible item that they are today. Pushing them through the curtain, the salesman insisted that they were ‘normal black jeans, like you...
 
Readers’ Lives
A new publication charts the stellar rise and dramatic fall of Germany’s most iconic teen magazine by Sarah Khan
Elvis Presley was a peculiar kind of star: he didn’t like to travel, and certainly not abroad. He never went to London, for example, or Mexico. In fact, apart from trips to Hawaii, he only left North America once, and then only because he had to. This once-in-a-lifetime journey took him to...
 
   


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