Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties.
Jerry SaltzMark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.
Jerry SaltzIf only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.
Jerry SaltzMaybe the museum [of Arts and Design ]needs to follow the advice of its acronym and not be afraid to go a little M.A.D.
Jerry SaltzArt schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.
Jerry SaltzThe debut show, “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There’s good work here, but much of what’s on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building, too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement.
Jerry Saltz