Caesura hosts an online panel on “The Crisis of Art Criticism", featuring Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review, Troy Sherman of Midwest Art Quarterly, and Gareth Thomas Kaye of Chicago Spleen.

Today, there is really no urgency to reflect on Jon McNaughton’s body of work. Adam Lehrer’s recent article in Compact, “The Limits of MAGA Art,'' stakes this out clearly. There is much less danger to endorsing McNaughton in the midst of a failing Biden presidency than there was at the height of anti-Trump hysteria . . . Why address it at all then?

In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967).

Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .

“…the triptych painfully reminds us that the form today signifies a broken totality that can only be unified, at best, by an act of artistic creation.”

As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics

It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.

Why is it that so much writing on art today — ostensibly criticism — only skates on the surface of artworks, providing description, identifying a handful subjects and themes, maybe some precedents, and then a conclusion — or rather, an ending. The writing stops.

The main problem that the artist encounters at work — the source of all their woes and triumphs — is that materials must be transformed: made to give what they cannot. Appearance is the mask of the true face beneath.

The most recent idea that appeared to me, so insistently that I felt compelled to write it down, was of painting as a scaffold. This was related to an older idea of mine, of painting as a veil . . .

Suzy V reviews Yesiyu Zhao's show "Journey to the West” at David Castillo Gallery in Miami.

Visiting the Noguchi Museum recently, I was struck by the difficulty of sculpture as art: how it's constrained by its physical presence to a degree that other media, like music, painting, and poetry, are not.

Charles Ray is unquestionably one of the most powerful and challenging sculptors alive. His recent works presented at the Met carry within them a subtle and expansive understanding of space, a boundless wit and delicacy, and a deep sense of history.

The space of Herrera’s paintings is not the real space we “inhabit” in the gallery or otherwise, but rather the illusory world of images and vision. Hers is the dream ground which, for over hundreds of years, artists have used to tell us stories, to perpetuate the likeness of people and landscapes, or reflect their feelings and visions materialized in objects.

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century.

It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another.

They’re explicit pictures, and in a world so entirely scrubbed clean of transgression, any sense of naughtiness is its own form of pleasure. Dainty feet and hands poke out in flirty little kicks, one appendage in front of the trompe l'œil frame, the other receding behind. The effect is not unlike a peep show.

It’s not true that the world is ending — if anything, it already has. And yet life continues, alive in its death. These thoughts — speculations — give a perfunctory account of the work of the late painter and poet Manoucher Yektai, a member of the New York School whose first solo show in the city since 1984 opened at Karma two weeks ago.

A work of art has never graced the cover of the journal October. Since the first issue was published in 1976, the front cover has only ever carried the journal’s allusive title, spelled out in large capitalised letters underneath the smaller italicised headings of ‘art’, ‘theory’, ‘criticism’ and ‘politics’ (in that order).

“From the artist’s perspective, it's the case that all art has to be a reconsideration of art history. Every artwork, in order to find its originality, has to reconsider all of art history.”