Search View Archive

Art

The Spiritual in Art

Even for a viewer largely ignorant of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tantra paintings at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art have a transcendent intensity. The central figures, remote yet radiant in their precision of detail and vibrancy of color, are pivots in a fierce, wheeling geometry that presents an image of dynamic cosmic forces the viewer is meant to internalize and take out into the world.

MoMA: How to Look at Modern Art-Abramovic

First of all, I would like to point out that I am more and more against criticism in general. Through my own experience, I have learned that at the end of the day criticism brings more bad than good energy to the table.

MoMA: How to Look at Modern Art-Brillembourg

Today a few architects make architecture that looks like sculpture and a few artists are making sculpture that looks like architecture.

MoMA: How to Look at Modern Art-Bartelik

As an art historian, an art critic, and an émigré living in New York, I am used to seeing things through other peoples’ eyes. Two friends came to attend one of the openings at the new MoMA.

MoMA: How to Look at Modern Art-Dunham

One is so grateful to have the familiar masterpieces of the collection back in Manhattan and available again that criticisms of the museum seem like hair-splitting.

MoMA: How to Look at Modern Art-Wei

By now, everyone knows that the renovated and greatly expanded Museum of Modern Art has re-opened, returning after a two and a half year residency—or exile, depending upon whom you’re talking to—in Queens. Leading the welcome home committee was The New York Times, which turned into The MoMA Times for the duration, reporting on every conceivable aspect of the project—before, during, after, still—omitting, it seems, only the brand of toilet paper available in the shining new bathrooms.

MoMA: How to Look at Modern Art-Danieli

The re-hanging of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art offers the opportunity to consider the framing and the re-framing of parts of the collection, which began even before the museum embarked upon its expansion.

Village of the Damned

Mobs of anxious East Village aficionados arrived by foot, bike, and taxi. Carlo McCormick was out front for a smoke break. I waited briefly before entering to see who would show up.

In Conversation

Catherine Murphy

Leading from the painter Catherine Murphy’s home in Poughkeepsie, New York to her studio is a beautiful path of brown sand over a field of frozen snow made by her husband the sculptor Harry Roseman.

Remembering Agnes Martin (1912-2004)

Maybe it was in 1972 that I first saw actual paintings by Agnes Martin, at Robert Elkon Gallery in New York.

On Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

In 1976 I arrived at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, to study “photography as language” with Nathan Lyons. At that time, VSW was arguably the best school of photographic studies in the country—intellectually rigorous, competitive, and austere.

ADVERTISEMENTS
close

The Brooklyn Rail

FEB 2005

All Issues