This month’s Artforum is pleasantly plump, filled with ads for Frieze New York and strong May shows. It’s the summer preview issue, and also features a number of thoughtful tributes to Mike Kelley, from Kim Gordon, Ann Goldstein, Tony Oursler and others. There’s a nice top 10 from Mexico City–based artist Adriana Lara too. (She’s a fan of the BBC’s Creatures of the Deep documentary.) In the slide show at left, our favorite ads in a month that was rich with them.
Basically it looks like the good folks at Matthew Marks Gallery came into The Observer offices on a deadline day and snapped a photo. Less half-eaten food in this picture, though. —M.H.M.
This ad is much more dense than you might think. Look at it on a nodal level, a fractal level, look at those little people trapped in the thing over there. Leaves? Where did those come from? How does Lando fit into all this? Is that even New York at the bottom of the ad? Obviously I am intrigued. This is on the roof of the Met, remember. —Dan Duray
Half-pages ads rarely make it into this feature, but this one is superb. It looks like it could have been a cover for an album released on Master P's No Limit label back in the 1990s, but look closely and you'll see that the Tate Modern is visible with a sign that reads "Gallery Auschwitz"—the painter is not such a fan of the institution. A lengthy interview with the Reena Spaulings proprietors provides the backstory. Sort of. —Andrew Russeth
Since we're doing this a little late, I already had the pleasure of seeing this show, which is great. But so is the ad! It looks like it goes forever in all directions, feels biological and artifactual at the same time and features thousands of equally disgusting textures. Anyway see the show. —D.D.
Is it some update of an AbEx canvas or a delicious chocolate cake? It's both! We don't see any Candlyand pin-up girls of the kind that usually populate Will Cotton's paintings, but we can say that all those layers of frosting are making us hungry. And, uh, contemplative. Because, you know, art and all that. —Michael H. Miller
We see Jeff Koons's Rabbit, we see Takashi Murakami's Oval Buddha, we see Delacroix's Lady Liberty Leading the People and we see a Rolls Royce hood ornament. What does this say about our malnutritioned psyches? —Rozalia Jovanovic
This youthful picture of activist Abbie Hoffman seems like it could have been taken in Zuccoti Park. But you can see it at Gagosian. A tongue-in-cheek nod to the steamrolling power of assimilation of the 1%? —R.J.
L&M's show of Mr. Stella's black, aluminum and copper paintings may be the most impressive exhibition in New York right now. Its filled with art-historical gems (including the very first black painting), has a catalogue with essays by Robert Pincus-Witten, Katy Siegel and Mr. Stella, and is being promoted with this ad, featuring a Hollis Frampton photograph from around 1960, in which a just-out-of-Princeton Mr. Stella looks like an artist-gangster at the top of his game.
