The artist known as Swoon, now in her late thirties, gained a reputation early in her career for evocative and beautifully crafted street art and for wacky performance pieces, like crashing the 2009 Venice Biennale in a boat made of…

For years I’ve looked at different works by countless artists. I’ve looked at different objects from all different periods of time—ancient, Renaissance, modern, post-war, contemporary, along with the efforts of teachers, friends, and…

  When I first moved to Taos, NM, about six years ago, a friend and I went on one of those house-and-garden tours put together by a local charitable organization. It seemed a good way to get to know the territory, and I’ve always loved to snoop inside other...

The very first art books I remember reading (or perhaps just looking at with awe and wonder) were part of the series called “Metropolitan Seminars in Art,” written by the critic John Canaday. Each slender gray volume…

Artists talk about altered states during the pandemic We are now about seven months into a worldwide catastrophe that has affected nearly every fiber and facet of our being. Many of us have been sheltering in place, limiting our contacts with the outside world,...

Everyone is a winner in the competition to replace those tired, toppled memorials In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May, protesters around the globe tore down monuments to the Confederacy, to slave traders, and to racist baddies of all stripes. I could not...

It’s a brave artist who attempts to say something new about landscape. The genre has been around since ancient times, when frescoes of Arcadian vistas adorned the walls of upscale villas, and its popularity has waxed and waned according to the talents and interests of...

Why is an art critic’s judgment better than yours—or maybe not? A few months back I did a stupid thing on Facebook and opined that I did not think Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor was very good (check out the hands and drapery), and that I found her pose in a...

Francis Picabia was a man way ahead of his times. Long before artists of our day became dedicated multitaskers—moving easily from performance to sculpture to video to whatever—Picabia (1879-1953) vigorously avoided any singular style or medium, forging a career that...

I opened up an intriguing cauldron of worms when I asked a bevy of art writers (call them critics, journalists, or simply reviewers) on what it means to have an “eye.” Why did they consider their judgments superior to those of the average museumgoer or art lover? The...