Glenn O’Brien said a lot during his tour of the Jean-Michel Basquiat show at Gagosian 24th Street for a group from the New York Academy of Art, but the main thing you walked away with was a sense that it must be really weird to have been pals with the artist. Read More
Sculptor Joel Shapiro was one of the first to arrive at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwartzman Building on Wednesday night, and the large, stately room looked a little empty as he and a few other punctual guests mingled before the event—a conversation between billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham. They weren’t alone for long. Dozens of fashionably late furs were soon cast off at the coat check and in poured a river of well-heeled guests, ready to celebrate Mr. Rubenstein’s receipt of the fifth annual Leonore and Walter Annenberg award for Diplomacy through the Arts from the Foundation for Art & Preservation in Embassies. Read More
As she watched a handsome room on the second floor of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in Midtown steadily fill with people on Wednesday night, Deborah Kass looked pleased. “It’s all friends—it’s perfect,” she told a bespectacled gentleman setting up stacks of her first monograph, Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After (2012), on a nearby table. Ms. Kass mingled amiably before the event—a conversation between her and curator Robert Storr held in conjunction with her recent mid-career retrospective at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which closed last week. Ms. Kass wore black, down to her trademark velvet slippers bearing the words OY and YO in gold, just like her twin paintings of those words that play on Ed Ruscha’s iconic OOF (1962), which is in the collection of MoMA. Read More
Always wanted to hang with Slavoj Žižek? Your chance has finally arrived. Read More
With a whopping 130 artists and more than 500 artworks, “Under the Big Black Sun,” the exhibition about California art from 1974 to 1981 that former Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles chief curator Paul Schimmel organized last fall, seems likely to be remembered as his swan song at the museum. (He departed last week, though he is completing work on “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962,” which opens in September.)
Just a few days before splitting with MOCA, where he’d been a curator for 22 years, Mr. Schimmel was at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., to participate in one of many panel discussions held during a weekend conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the school’s Center for Curatorial Studies. The discussion in which Mr. Schimmel took part was titled “Case Studies,” and invited curator panelists to explain how they go about assembling shows. Listening to him talk about and show slides from “Under the Big Black Sun,” which opened last October as part of the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time” initiative and ran through Feb. 13, provided a window into his curating process. Read More
“When I moved to New York at 16, as Sabine mentioned, I encountered the great museums of New York—the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Guggenheim,” the artist Andrea Fraser told a crowd at MoMA last night. “I found them absolutely terrifying. I found them incredibly intimidating, with their overwhelming legitimacy, their overwhelming authority.” Read More
