Comments for Hyperallergic

Comment on An Artist’s Dispatches From Luigi Mangione’s Hearing by kim lakin

kim lakin — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 22:26:47 +0000

In reply to Joseph Arguelles. It’s still sick to saintify a cold blooded killer. And I hate the insurance business. What have we come to?

Comment on Men Undressing for Women and Other Contemporary Takes on the Old Masters by bdnstudio

bdnstudio — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:55:09 +0000

Wow

Comment on An Artist’s Dispatches From Luigi Mangione’s Hearing by Joseph Arguelles

Joseph Arguelles — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:47:58 +0000

The major payers practices would be recognized as organized crime in a healthy economy/society.
Physicians, hospital administrations and medical societies are akin to the shop keepers that acquiesced to the demands of the last centuries mafia in order to survive.

Comment on A Garden of Ideas in John Berger’s Letters to His Son by Jo Ford

Jo Ford — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:46:15 +0000

Thank you for this review. Mostly I don’t care about artists or critics lives, just the work itself, but in this case the connection of observed life to both art and writing seems so poignant that you have convinced me I need to get this book. Thanks again.

Comment on A View From the Easel by Jozie Rabyor

Jozie Rabyor — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:37:38 +0000

I love this ‘Easel’ series. Thank you for choosing such interesting and articulate artists time after time.

Comment on Luigi Mangione Cleans Up Nicely in New Courtroom Sketches by butch Murphy

butch Murphy — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:15:12 +0000

I complement Isa Farfan for her objective reporting without appearing to lean one way or the other, focusing on those artists who sketch courtroom persons, most often unrecognized for their talent. butch

Comment on Philip Guston Mural Warning Against Fascism Restored in Mexico by David Behl

David Behl — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 14:42:32 +0000

Seeing this mural explains the figurative painting that Guston made later in life. His figures became more abstract in their poses and depiction within unreal spaces, colors were more styled, impact more blunt, but still very political. These paintings on canvas were created after his totally abstract period in midlife.

Comment on Suggestive Portraits of Queer Priests and Nuns Spark Fury in Mexico by Denny Smith

Denny Smith — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 01:44:05 +0000

I love it! Everywhere and every time the Right Wing of the world’s religions gets huffy over a smackdown pie in the face, never do they think “Hmm, does our royal prissiness provoke our own hissy fits?” You’d think the 35-year-old storms over Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, et al, or much earlier upsets by Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, would have fostered fearless moral inventories amongst conservative Catholics, Evangelical Protestants and Fundamentalist Muslims around the globe. After all, no-one was calling for crucifixions–just the right to boink in peace, to choose the boinkee we love, and control our creation of boinklings.
But for the Right, freedom means they’re free to lecture you & me. The ancient idea that making love is a gift from god was scribbled over with Christian graffiti saying nope, it’s “Cuius regio, eius religio;” an actual assumption from Europe’s Middle Ages that essentially meant “you’ll follow the rule of your leader’s religion.” Doesn’t sound all that Medieval, does it? Ever since then the godly closed their eyes and thought of England while the ungodly birds & bees & queer penguins of the world continued with unspeakable mating calls, feathered burlesques and nuptial queen flights. But if work and war (and now the weather) are so not fun, can’t we at least let sex be fun? Or at least artfully funny? The Catholic Church, which made me the pro-labor, pro-immigrant, anti-death penalty saint I am today, would win so much goodwill if it let women decide their own corporal careers, and allowed priests to realize healthy conjugations not limited to the Latin verbs of their sticky dreams. I’ve actually shared a few discreet, uh, interjections with lonely, wayward priests, and lordy-lord, even in brightly lighted rooms (so god could see everything), their passion-propelled “Eo!” was a cry for freedom like Jesus might have still heard from Spartacus, three centuries later.
Mexico, with its brave history of anti-clerical secular reforms, is perfectly primed to pressure a mummified Church to follow (a more fearless) Francis into a 21st-century Ethos of Eros. But heads-up for the Church Fathers: to pray for sexual enlightenment, start by turning down those lights.

Comment on Massive “Free Luigi” Image Projected on Manhattan Building by Nelly

Nelly — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:50:01 +0000

And only two months later, mayor Adam’s himself is on the verge of being impeached by his own constituency for corruption and quid pro quo deal with DT. What a soap opera! Waiting for the next episode

Comment on Donald Trump Brings Back “Degenerate Art” by E Prelinger

E Prelinger — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:48:39 +0000

Thank you Ed Simon for a terrific and necessary piece. I taught that exhibition and its context to college art history students for decades. May they use that knowledge to fight against this tragic and atrocious recurrence of cultural fascism.

Comment on Donald Trump Brings Back “Degenerate Art” by Alex Clark

Alex Clark — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 16:48:13 +0000

We need to revive and make Degenerative Art Exhibitions great again!

Comment on Donald Trump Brings Back “Degenerate Art” by Monroe H Pastermack Jr

Monroe H Pastermack Jr — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 16:16:37 +0000

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art reproduced the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibit in 1991. It was chilling.

Comment on Donald Trump Brings Back “Degenerate Art” by butch Murphy

butch Murphy — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:24:32 +0000

Ed Simon’s comparisons are, as expected a worthwhile read, causing pause, not to push us into our hidden burrows of complacency, but to propel us to explore avenues of joyful expression in our creative sanctuaries of DEI. Keep them coming Ed.

Comment on Alexis Rockman Paints Humanity’s Final Season by Hrag Vartanian

Hrag Vartanian — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:03:30 +0000

In reply to Jozie Rabyor. Thanks for your comment. It is an impressive series, and I hope they are exhibited one day with Cole's series. It would make the meaning more impactful.

Comment on Repatriation is a Start, but True Healing for Benin Requires More by Carolyn Grimstead

Carolyn Grimstead — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:14:34 +0000

Hopefully you are familiar with the documentary film, DAHOMEY, about repatriation issues.
Highly recommended!

Comment on Roxanne Jackson’s Fantasia Under the Sea by Cheryl Gross

Cheryl Gross — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:30:23 +0000

Great art!

Comment on Hundreds of Artists Ask NEA to Stop Enforcing Trump’s Anti-DEI Mandates by Margot H Knight

Margot H Knight — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 15:56:28 +0000

Sounds like the strategy adopted by many, including NEA.

“Suppose simply keeping still means you manage until the end”
Frau Schneider, Cabaret

Comment on Tabitha Arnold’s Tapestries Eulogize the Working Class by Mary Grayeske

Mary Grayeske — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 14:57:00 +0000

Can someone tell me what sintra is?

Comment on Dawoud Bey Asks, Can Landscapes Hold Traumas? by Gail Rothschild

Gail Rothschild — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:59:55 +0000

Thank you for a poignant review, Seph. And for bringing us a show that we may not all be able to see in person. A perfect piece. 🙏🏽

Comment on Dawoud Bey Asks, Can Landscapes Hold Traumas? by Carolyn Grimstead

Carolyn Grimstead — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:21:53 +0000

A targeted review well appreciated. The exhibit’s sound track adds to the enormity of Bey’s attempt to re-interpret landscape as an expression of profound loss not only to ourselves, but also to the nation.

Comment on Alexis Rockman Paints Humanity’s Final Season by Jozie Rabyor

Jozie Rabyor — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:16:39 +0000

These paintings [my online images] are amazing, inventive, and beautiful in a good (albeit sometimes stomach-clenching) way. Thank you for putting them all in this review, including the details and one installation shot.
That skeleton riding the rat was a smart choice to put in the newsletter. I’ve always been fascinated by those two Europes — the pre- and the post-Black Death versions. I guessed what the Newsletter image might be as soon as my eye took it in. You had me at rat feces? Oh, dear. An invention, of course, since the plague was spread by flea bites, not poop. But a felicitous decision on the part of Mr. Rockman that let him engulf Naples in that revolting yellow glaze.
Realizing that he painted all these in 2024, apparently, and they’re 3 by 7 feet, impresses the heck out of me. Seven of them, with incredible detail. To the extent possible, I like to imagine other people’s minds when they’re gripped by an obsession. He must have been painting constantly last year. I hope the show does well. Thanks for featuring it.

Comment on Why Did Australia Abruptly Ditch Its Venice Biennale Artist and Curator? by Linelle Stepto

Linelle Stepto — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 20:07:34 +0000

The Australian newspaper is a voice for the political right in Australia. They control our cultural practices too? The fear mongering which promotes a fictional ‘antisemitism’ in Australia is a product, largely, of the Murdoch press, is grossly misleading & dangerous for the array of cultures Australia is.

Comment on Luis Barragán’s Pink Equestrian Estate to Become a Public Arts Hub by Christopher Plum

Christopher Plum — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:18:48 +0000

To get a sample, and a break from winter, see the Barragan inspired show at the NY Botanical Garden (in the Bronx): “The Orchid Show: Mexican Modernism.” It’s in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and is inspired by the architecture of Luis Barragán.

Comment on Finding Flaco Lovingly Details Owl’s Year of Freedom by Christopher Plum

Christopher Plum — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:13:30 +0000

And don’t miss the current exhibition at the New York Historical Society on Flaco. It’s on until July 6.

Comment on Philip Guston Mural Warning Against Fascism Restored in Mexico by Denny Smith

Denny Smith — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 18:52:17 +0000

What an amazing restoration! And the artists’ intent here could not be more powerfully anti-fascist. Guston’s legacy deserves so much more than to be misunderstood and censored by wokesters, who too often have acted on the shallowest understanding and impulses.

Comment on The Wobbly Humanity of Cy Twombly by Denny Smith

Denny Smith — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 18:34:44 +0000

Wonderfully drawn picture of Cy Twombly’s art. Like Lisa, I’ve long been reflexively enamored of his work, but also unhappy with the number of times his experiments don’t succeed. He’s often lumped with Rauschenberg and Johns, for the collective distance they put between themselves and the Abstract Expressionists. But I think Twombly’s career more closely parallels that of Samuel Barber, the greatest composer, in my estimation, that America has yet produced. Both men were assaulted or neglected by the critics of their time–accused of something like Modernist insufficiency. Donald Judd had the nerve to say there wasn’t much to Twombly’s painting, as if . . . ?! And Barber faced the same charge leveled as that against Brahms–regressively romantic, rather than progressively chromatic (in Brahms’ case, and dodecaphonic for Barber).
But actually, Twombly was destined for disdain by the Pollack & Judd establishment for much the same reasons, I think, it was lobbed at Barber, Aaron Copland, John Cage, Lou Harrison, W. H. Auden, Gabriel Garcia Lorca & Reinaldo Arenas–they were insufficiently heterosexual or patriotic. But without fail, time passes the spotlight & microphone to a new, gloriously unprepared generation. And the beneficiaries, now long-gone, are those gloriously Athenian Americans, with their spartan arcs & spare-of-line arabesques.

Comment on Hidden Woman Portrait Found Beneath Picasso Masterpiece by Bob Nowalk

Bob Nowalk — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 17:38:21 +0000

Thank you for bringing attention to this. X-ray and infrared imaging tell us much about an artist like Picasso’s process and direction. It makes him a little more human. Seeing this process of editing first hand can be even more revealing. I have often pointed out to my students that the Blue Period guitar player at the Art Institute of Chicago has, for many years, been revealing the pentimento of a woman underneath the guitarist. When they see it, they understand that to get what we want, we sometimes need to willing to paint out what does not feel right. It’s all a part of the process of art.

Comment on Prettiness Is Political for Marie Laurencin by Alex Clark

Alex Clark — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 13:35:58 +0000

I’ve always loved Laurencin, especially for her beautiful tonal harmonies. Her subjects are ‘pretty’ but carry an important cubist influence, and beautiful linear design. A Laurencin is beautiful in the same way a pink period Picasso is.

Comment on Why Do All My Hinge Options Look Like Guys From Old Paintings? by mpschmidt1

mpschmidt1 — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 12:28:17 +0000

Touche. While I have no experience looking over the fence at the male candidates, I can tell you these well curated male profiles very much fit the female collective as well, fish and all. Gym? check. Guns? check. Drinks/drunk? check. And those photos with the pets and kids? Seriously?? It’s a fascinating snapshot album documenting just where we are culturally as (mostly) single humans., “wookin’ for nub.”

Comment on The Singular Wit of One of the New Yorker’s First Women Cartoonists by Cheryl Gross

Cheryl Gross — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 12:05:00 +0000

Great piece.

Comment on Jeffrey Gibson’s Venice Biennale Show Is Heading to LA by Lynne Allen

Lynne Allen — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:35:04 +0000

wonderful article!

Comment on Faith Ringgold Paved the Way by Pamela Hastings

Pamela Hastings — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 15:03:03 +0000

I’m not black, but I am female and a fiber artist, and Faith Ringgold is one of my heroepeople as well. Pamela Hastings.

Comment on The Singular Wit of One of the New Yorker’s First Women Cartoonists by Pamela Hastings

Pamela Hastings — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:57:04 +0000

Thank you for sharing this…Cartoons are still, as you said, a way of being subversive in this messed up era. Pamela Hastings

Comment on Appalled by X and Meta? Try These Social Media Alternatives by Sandy Sanders

Sandy Sanders — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 22:43:01 +0000

I think society is finding out that an internet controlled by well funded capitalist enterprises and thereby merely a conglomerate of centralized totalitarian schemes, can only fail to meet visitor needs. When a centralized forum like FB, X, Instagram , Pinterest, and even the major search engines, attempts to serve thousands, millions, billions, how is it possible to actually to do so? They will build cheats like algos, censoring, marginalizations and shadow-banning to concentrate flowing maximum masses through their preferred profitable-for-them setups. This produces monoculture massing, a vast negation of diverse cultural output. It’s kind of the mental monoculture of TV culture, on steroids, and it’s wearing off.

I just got notice of Society6 reducing their 400,000 artists to a selected few, and thus my pop-shop-art postings there, which never received attention after the first month or so of posting, were to be removed. A look at Society6 contents now shows mostly illustration work applied to home furnishings like tablecloths, curtains and bedspreads. The app, by censoring views to the most purchased or viewed, has winnowed themselves down to what is reasonable to sell. To sell, is the defining limit within the capitalist environment and possibly the defining limit to all internet “social” media related apps in the existing contemporary social arrangement.

Apparently, this Walmart/Amazon company store mass audience approach is in the long run a failure. Is the fracturing we see documented in this article, the first signs of centralization’s failure and the beginning of a move to mass decentralization? I certainly hope so. More localized, diversity in content, small scaled, internet venues that function like small businesses or local niche interest groups, online and in local real time should appeal to mass culture burnout. It seems so much better to me to be able to find unique interests locally where they can be engaged in physically as well as online.

Comment on Appalled by X and Meta? Try These Social Media Alternatives by Scott Waterman

Scott Waterman — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 16:13:43 +0000

Flickr? I’ve been using it since 2005. Still the best photo sharing.

Comment on Etel Adnan Captured the Light of Many Suns by Patricia Moran

Patricia Moran — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 05:54:54 +0000

When I scroll Adnan’s work, I swallow hard and can not believe the joy I feel.

Paddy

Comment on Facing $10M Budget Deficit, Brooklyn Museum Will Lay Off Dozens of Workers by Butch Murphy

Butch Murphy — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:43:45 +0000

I’ve often published I wouldn’t want to trade jobs with museum or gallery directors and for that matter, university presidents trying to appease the unhappiness, most often from unrelated issues, of employees, artists, board of directors, students, patrons or visitors, by setting reasonable standards. But that’s what they, maybe naively, signed up for, probably never thinking they would have to deal with issues totally out of their control, the likes of Gaza, Covid or a Nazi-like talking head USA President cutting grants right and left to benefit the few. I have no idea what the going rate for Pasternak’s position in similar institutions and cities. Seems to me, a humble welder. extraordinary. From my perspective, attempting to destroying our DEI sanctuaries of art, to push our displaced frustration is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Once we identify the negative force, we can best “approach” a negotiable resolution to unify our collective unhappiness and move on with art, for art’s sake. Disclaimer: my goal is being “calm.”

Comment on Facing $10M Budget Deficit, Brooklyn Museum Will Lay Off Dozens of Workers by a museum worker

a museum worker — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:37:15 +0000

In reply to NYC art historian/critic. I couldn't agree more, these salaries are outrageous and increasingly common, while the museum staff who hold the institution together are paycheck to paycheck or expendable.

Comment on Facing $10M Budget Deficit, Brooklyn Museum Will Lay Off Dozens of Workers by Richard Neel

Richard Neel — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:36:47 +0000

Pasternak should initially look at her personal gains and salary and make adjustments before she asks others to suffer due to what may possibly have been decisions made under her leadership to not have addressed long standing problems. Do we still define this as “leadership”?

Comment on Prettiness Is Political for Marie Laurencin by Yasmin Dixon

Yasmin Dixon — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:36:12 +0000

…the good, the true, and the pretty beautiful….

Comment on The Wobbly Humanity of Cy Twombly by Yasmin Dixon

Yasmin Dixon — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:29:37 +0000

Give that man a chicken leg….

Comment on Museums Scramble to Grasp Impact of Trump’s DEI Mandate by Margot Knight

Margot Knight — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 16:29:09 +0000

Watch the courts. There are substantive separation of powers and rule of law issues at play.

I am hoping that artists, scholars, cultural organizations and their national service organizations are exploring legal avenues to insure freedom of expression remains a core, unfettered value of their work. Or else we might have to start finding caves to hide art and scholarship until this latest battle of cultural wars subsides.

Comment on Caspar David Friedrich Captured the Belated Moment by Willa Lewis

Willa Lewis — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 14:21:41 +0000

Saw the Met exhibit yesterday. Great to read this to have a better understanding of the work and my reaction to it (somewhat bored, I must admit!).

Comment on Caspar David Friedrich Captured the Belated Moment by Jozie Rabyor

Jozie Rabyor — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:41:44 +0000

Beautiful, evocative, thought-provoking work all round –Friedrich’s paintings, Natalie Haddad’s interview questions and editing, and Professor Koener’s insights. I am pleased that she struck such a nice balance between Koener’s personal/autobiographical material and his scholarly responses to CDF’s oeuvre. It was also fun and mind-expanding to be pulled in so many directions — the personal, the objective, the ancient past (rocks!) and the more recent past, the present, a contemplation of the future, eternity, the material, the spiritual, the psychological, and so on.
I always like work — books, movies, essays, etc. — that present multiple points of view, so the way Koener’s comments continually invited me to “look at it this way,” then to “consider this perspective,” then noted “this is a mystery,” and so on appealed to this strong bias of my own. Well played, all!

Comment on Facing $10M Budget Deficit, Brooklyn Museum Will Lay Off Dozens of Workers by NYC art historian/critic

NYC art historian/critic — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:41:11 +0000

Pasternak should share the salary squeeze by halving hers. Her $1M+ compensation is twice what is reasonable. And I hope this deficit makes them realize that chasing entry fees by privileging social justice content over aesthetic/artistic skills just alienates their natural audience of those engaged with experiencing substantial art. Where are their former inventive takes on historical art or scholarly interpretations of current modes? And their re-installed permanent collection of American art is a travesty.

Comment on Re-evaluating the Guerrilla Girls for Today’s Politics by Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:02:30 +0000

From the Guerrilla Girls:
We want like everyone to know that the Anatomically Correct Oscar billboard that was commented above as being ‘a bit late on the scene’ was actually a retooling of a billboard we did fourteen years earlier, in 2002. It was up on Hollywood Boulevard that year during the month of the Academy Awards. We redid the earlier work with updated stats in 2016 after the #oscarssowhite movement to show how little progress had happened.

We did a lot of stickers, posters and billboards about the film industry between 2002-2006 that all can see on our projects page. https://www.guerrillagirls.com/projects

Comment on After More Than 20 Years, Kate Hargrave Lets Her Paintings Leave the Nest by Nene Humphrey

Nene Humphrey — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:48:07 +0000

Too bad I can’t get to Portland- Her work sounds pretty amazing!

Comment on Swedish Punk Band Viagra Boys’s Absurdist Send-Up of the Art World by Lawrence Roberts

Lawrence Roberts — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 03:00:56 +0000

That’s the way I feel about it.
Is it on youtube or spotify?

Comment on Caspar David Friedrich Captured the Belated Moment by David Carrier

David Carrier — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 02:48:14 +0000

I was impressed, pleased, puzzled, fascinated, and instructive. Really a model review!

Comment on Julia Warhola Was an Artist in Her Own Right by Bruce Pollock

Bruce Pollock — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 17:03:22 +0000

There is nothing in darkness that will not come to light – Thank you Elaine for bringing Julia to light – and for your review Ed. Can’t wait to read it.