Reviews Roundup

It's time again for another Reviews Roundup... This edition's Golden Pen Award goes to Jerry Saltz, not for sleeping at the Gugg, but for this perfect gem of a sentence about Giorgio Morandi: "His paintings are optical odes on metaphysical urns." Runners-up are Howard Halle for calling the "anyspacewhatever" show for what it is -- a circle jerk -- and Holland Cotter for his take on William Eggleston, which follows...

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Jan. 25)

"...combination joy ride, funeral march and bad-trip bender. Patches of it feel pretty tame now, but whole stretches still have the morning-after wooziness of three decades ago. ... Although Mr. Eggleston rejects the label of regional photographer, he was, at least initially, dealing with the complicated subject of a traditional Old South (he says the compositions in his early pictures were based on the design of the Confederate flag) meeting a speeded-up New South, which he tended to observe from a distance, shooting fast-food joints and drive-ins almost surreptitiously, as if from the dashboard of a car. ...there’s something truly creepy and deadly going on, as there is in much of Mr. Eggleston’s art. You might label it Southern Gothic; but whatever it is, it surfaces when a lot of his work is brought together. ... In many of these images color has the artificial flush of a mortician’s makeup job." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"You can always tell a William Eggleston photograph. It’s the one in color that hits you in the face and leaves you confused and happy, and perhaps convinces you that you don’t understand photography nearly as well as you thought you did. ...to be pummelled by eccentric beauty, and to wonder about it. ... His eye for epiphanies in the everyday raises suspicions that, without his aid, we miss more than we see of what falls within our gaze. ... He shoots like a shutterbug and executes like a painter. Synthetic gorgeousness iconizes pictures that flaunt the nonchalance of snapshots. ... I find it rewarding to think of Eggleston as a blues photographer. The extraordinary aesthetic discipline of his photographs shimmers with subliminal knowledge of the hell-bent—although, in a Southern vein, sardonically mannered... ... His great subject is the too-muchness of the real. He does regularly suppress one significant element of lived experience: time. His art re-proves Roland Barthes’s influential theory of the punctum—a Proustian quantum of lost time—as intrinsic to photography’s emotional power. The hour on Eggleston’s clock is always right now. Whatever is dated in his early subjects—car models, hairdos—barges into the present with a redolence of William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past isn’t only not dead, it isn’t even past." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"Eggleston is a poet of the downbeat and desultory. His vision begins and ends with the copious amount of booze and drugs he has consumed. ... Each of Eggleston’s down-and-out subjects is merely a mirror of the photographer’s own desperation. ... What sums up this show for me is one picture of some naked loser on a divan, his dick sticking out of his pubic bush, two muskets attached above him to the wall. This encapsulates the limits of Egglstons’s rancid vision, echoed in the abandoned objects, like bicycles and whiskey bottles, he cherishes with his lens." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"The show is big, jumbled and dimly lit. And it’s essential viewing -- a collection of national portraits that are also ground-shifting works of art. ... The result was the exposure of a national mood that had little to do with rah-rah jingoism. Images of old men in motel rooms, condiments on a takeout counter and plastic farm animals lined up on a car hood all capture a homegrown anomie -- a productive combination of laziness and restlessness. ... Avoiding conventions of beauty, Eggleston established new ones." -Carly Berwick/Bloomberg

"Looking at Eggleston's photos in the gorgeous, captivating new Whitney retrospective, there's just no disputing their aesthetic authority or their eerie power. ... The shower, the oven, the ketchup bottles and the pinball machines all capture the inadvertent, even perverse, poetry of the specific and the mundane. At the dark heart of Eggleston's enterprise lies a mixture of tenderness and contempt for the time and place he inherited and consummately claimed as his own: the American South in the latter half of the 20th century. ... He wasn't interested in social change, but in the loners, eccentrics and humdrum souls who turned strange and surreal through his viewfinder. ... The artist uncovers - or does he bestow? - the beatitude of the banal." -Ariella Budick/FT

"The scenes are familiar, almost homey, and the color is mesmerizing. ...there is a serenity, as if the world had literally stopped. Eggleston has a rare ability to create a space and his photos are a bubble of perfection where the subject exists in a space that seems built just for it. ... The new works are sleek images suited for the pages of a magazine and lack the scope and heart of his earlier works." -Associated Press


Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 at the Museum of Modern Art (-Jan. 12)

"The exhibition illustrates, step by step, exactly how Miró stalked and attacked painting — zapped its conventions, messed up its history, spoiled its market value — through 12 distinct groups of experimental works produced over a decade. If, in the end, painting survived, that’s neither here nor there. The story’s the thing. Crisp, clear and chronological, the show reads like a combination of espionage yarn and psychological thriller set out in a dozen page-turning chapters. ... not the blockbuster slog but the experience of one artist’s creative process and the experience of an exhibition as a form of thinking. Like reading a book, the process makes you part of the trip, not just a witness to it. ... Destroy the artist you think the world thinks you’re supposed to be, and you’ll start to find the artist you are." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"'I want to assassinate painting,' Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: 'I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.' (He is quoted, along similar lines, as having put the Cubists on notice: 'I will break their guitar.') Brave words, for a painter. ... With cultivated 'automatist' spontaneity, he worked on raw canvas, copper, and the recently invented Masonite; employed gross materials, including sand and tar; made thoroughly abstract pictures; and hatched funky varieties of collage and assemblage, whose influence would extend to Robert Rauschenberg. It’s not his fault—or is it?—that the show leaves an impression of being distant and dated, and strangely tame. ... nothing subverts an inevitable epithet for this artist—'poetic'—which seems to me equivocal. How is it a signal virtue for an art other than poetry to be poetic? (Is poetry better if it’s painterly, or photography if it’s cinematic?) Miró’s campaign against painting can seem an excuse for evading the rigors intrinsic to the medium." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"...Miró was always a painter’s painter and thus far more popular in the past than he is now. Whole bodies of work are surely passed by artistic progress to the point that even a Miró becomes relatively insignificant. Yet, there are pleasures on view at MoMA, however small and diffuse." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet


theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum (-Jan. 7)

"There are non sequiturs to read, jokes to get, videos to watch, shoes to kick off, colored lights to see, recorded sounds to hear and, yes, the bed, part of a hotel room by the German artist Carsten Höller. For a price and with a reservation, up to two people can spend the night. (Like so many must-dos in New York, it is sold out.) Yet as you move up the museum’s great spiraling ramp, just about everything here sneaks up on you in some way, expands in pleasure and meaning and also starts overlapping and ricocheting with everything else. ... Emerging in the mid-1990s, the relational artists favored a more carefree approach that featured ephemeral situations, functional objects (often involving seating), architectural follies, amusing signage, elegant or arcane graphic design, performances, freebies (including food) and loosely planned group events. ... It is invigorating to see a high-profile New York museum submit to such an experimental form of institutional loosening up, and in its premier, signature space. It feels like change." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"I have always wanted to have sex in a museum. To me museums are ecstasy machines, places to experience rapture, and the real thing is the real thing. So I jumped at what seemed like an unbelievable chance to carry out my fantasy: an opportunity to spend the night with my wife on a rotating queen-size bed fitted out with satin sheets on the sixth ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. ... This cheekily titled outing is devoted to a clique of artists who reengineered art over the past fifteen years or so. They created the most influential stylistic strain to emerge in art since the early seventies. ... Unfortunately, Spector has removed most of the 'relational' parts of this art and left us with plain old aesthetics. Wan ones at that, since their work was never that visual. Viewers drift through this show barely stopping; the exhibition is so tame that it’s impossible to imagine anyone’s being challenged to rethink ideas about art exhibitions. ... Andrea Zittel, Andrea Fraser, Trisha Donnelly, Cosima von Bonin, and Vanessa Beecroft are all missing. Whether or not they belong strictly in the in-group, yet again we’ve got a show that’s 80 percent guys." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.

"Frank Lloyd Wright had a pretty decent imagination, but I doubt he could’ve envisioned his baby, the Guggenheim rotunda, being turned into the setting for a circle jerk. ... Known for collaborating with one another on various projects that take them to the far corners of the art world, they share an aesthetic of social engagement, and apparently, a knack for conflating mutual admiration with self-regard. Viewers can certainly be forgiven for wondering if the curators forgot to put up a show: The space looks half-empty, but it’s really just devoid of ideas. ... Accordingly, relational art has become a sort of political expression without the real politics that might upset the moneyed elites who support artists and art administrators." -Howard Halle/TONY


NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith at P.S. 1 (-Jan. 26)

"Somewhere between Pollock and Pop, new art developed an allergy to the word spiritual unless it was attached to ethnicity. It was O.K. to make altars in galleries if you were Mexican-American — in fact, you were sort of required to — but if you were plain old American, no. Yet on the fringes, where the most together thinking tends to take place, there was resistance to this bias. In the late 1960s the American poet Ishmael Reed coined the term Neo-HooDoo to describe an aesthetic that was devotional without being dogmatically religious, ritual-related without having prescribed forms, and rooted both outside and inside the Western mainstream. ... Mr. Reed’s concept, which riffed on African religious practices transmitted to the New World, embraced incantatory poetry, hypnotic popular music and art that was activist in an emotional, political and formal sense. Now it lends its name to a quiet, meditative, spare-to-the-point-of-thin-looking exhibition... There is little question that contemporary art is changing yet again, and in ways that have little directly to do with the current economic crisis. After several years of submersion in lightweight post-Pop painting, clever design and quip-driven soft politics, we seem to be ready for something with a little more depth, breadth and soul. I’m not saying NeoHooDoo is the answer; it’s not forceful enough to be an answering sort of show. But it asks old questions about unanswerables — who are we, who were we, where are we going, what can we be — in slightly new ways, and that’s a start." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (-Feb. 15)

"...fun, but not lots of fun. That’s no surprise. Calder’s early career as a darling of smart-set expatriates and eagerly condescending French Americanists in Jazz Age Paris has long since yellowed and cracked. (Does any self-respecting twenty-first-century child, of any age, genuinely enjoy the parlor whimsies of Calder’s 'Circus,' with its awful confidence of being irresistible?) But the show ends up strong, and this jolts. ... The exhibition’s teeming array of objects, pictures, and projected films shifts into overdrive midway, pivoting on a visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930 that alerted Calder to the possibilities of abstraction. His penchant for strenuous insouciance became a genius for playful toil, investing modern forms with timeless dramas—implied when not actual—of gravity and motion." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"The best of Alexander Calder's early sculptures lie at the crossroads between gaudy inspiration and lofty aspiration. Aroused by the atmospheres of the circus, the nightclub and the boxing ring, Calder performed ever more daring avant-garde feats, leaping from conventional realism to experiments in space and line. ... Ideally, a gallery would be filled with a whole choir of moving sculptures, a crazed choreography of mechanical parts; instead, the Whitney offers a video loop showing the gizmos doing their simple acts in sequence, one by one, while the real sculptures sit disabled and mute. It's Calder without the juice." -Ariella Budick/FT


Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 at the Jewish Museum (March 12)

"... only partly about the beloved Russian Modernist painter Marc Chagall. Mainly it is a fascinating tale of two vanguard theater companies that flourished in Moscow for a few years following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. ...a big, walk-in scrapbook of a show presenting more than 200 pieces of art and ephemera including drawings, paintings, photographs, posters, sheet music, costumes and clips from vintage films." -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Dec. 14)

"Giorgio Morandi’s paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style. Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they’re doing it? It must have vexed Morandi that, as art leapt forward in the twentieth century, he kept painting the same thing over and over. ... Wallace Stevens wrote of wanting 'to feel the same way over and over,' the desire for 'the river to go on flowing the same way.' That’s Morandi. Seemingly in violation of natural law, he stepped into the same river thousands of times. His paintings are optical odes on metaphysical urns. ... Morandi can seem like a conservative who sat out modernism. But like Bacon or Giacometti, he recast reality without going wholly abstract. Physically, the paintings are slow accretions of pigment and color. Painter Allison Katz has called them 'irritants that grow like pearls,' meaning, I think, that his work begins with small pictorial events that gather weight and become perfect things." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.

"Morandi worked in an allusive and increasingly reductive fashion, restricting not just his subject matter to cylinders and cubes, but also limiting his palette, often to near monochromes. ... Widely revered as a teacher as well as a painter, Morandi was disinterested in rendering anything in naturalistic detail. His pitchers, vases and boxes amount to gnomic silhouettes, not household goods, and their mysteries are as seductive as their tender imperfections." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg


The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 1)

"...an eclecticism that is as sublime as their task is ridiculous: to mine the 84,000 works acquired during de Montebello's tenure for just 300 that could adequately represent his character and vision. ... Their wildly unpredictable presentation, organized by dates of acquisition, looks like a glorified pawn shop in some galleries and a marvelous cabinet of curiosities in others. ... Philippe de Montebello picked his way through this mountain of stuff -- from paintings to swords, chalices, ball gowns and tapestries -- with sovereign ease and spectacular taste." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"...the show is a vast, thrilling and frankly overwhelming homage to the man and to the spirit of collaboration that elevates this great institution." -Ariella Budick/FT


Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone at the New Museum (-Jan. 26)

"...spunky, songful, subtly disciplined informality of the American abstract painter and ceramist (and also, recently, furniture-maker) Heilmann, sixty-eight, has provided low-profile joys in art since the late nineteen-sixties. Hers is the type of art you may cherish as a touchstone of your own private taste. ...art, not life style, fired her intense ambition. She was friends, early on, with Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. She moved to New York in 1968 to hang out with Donald Judd and Robert Smithson and other 'big boys' of minimalism and emerging post-minimalism, on the exclusive second floor of Max’s Kansas City. But she was not a social success. Choosing to paint got her scorned in those painting-allergic circles, though persisting with it made her tough. This grounding accounts for a subliminal sense of steely intelligence in works of ostensibly carefree spontaneity. There is a conjectural air to her enterprise." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker


Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum (-Jan. 11)

"...this terrific, if chronologically confused, survey couldn’t have been better timed. From the earliest drawings and black-and-white photo-grids (in which the two, wearing their signature tweedy suits, stroll through the woods, drink in bars and strike desultory poses in empty rooms), to the vivid, stained-glass-like murals that mark their later work, the mood gyrates from elegiac to bleak to apocalyptic as the duo transforms the idiosyncrasies of British behavior into a metaphor for that calamity called the human condition. ... More than just making art, Gilbert & George see themselves as an artwork. One never appears without the other or without the matching outfits that semaphore the repression of British public schools and counting houses alike. Yet they channel the conservative nature of English culture as much as they caricature it." -Howard Halle/TONY


Art and China’s Revolution at the Asia Society (-Jan. 11)

"...the first show of its kind, and it tries hard to balance aesthetics with political history. As a timeline delineating a chronology of Chinese art helpfully shows, Soviet-influenced Socialist Realism replaced China’s traditional ink-and-brush-style painting virtually overnight. Posters and canvases were used to spread the word of party policies. Teapots, matchbooks, vases and statuettes were emblazoned with Mao’s face. ... In today’s China, it’s easy to find a contemporary artist appropriating revolutionary icons, but it’s nearly impossible to find works from the Cultural Revolution on display at state-run museums." -Barbara Pollack/TONY


second lives: remixing the ordinary at the Museum of Art and Design (-Feb. 14)

"There are 51 artists in the show, and many pieces to relish for more reasons than just trancelike seriality. But the inherent banality of what Mark E. Smith called 'the 3 R's'—repetition, repetition, repetition—has a leveling effect when repeated from piece to piece. Eventually everything seems exactly as dumb, unfortunately, as the dumbest piece. The work crowds the space awfully and starts to blare; though the curatorial thesis is perfectly neat and worthy, the show starts to feel very defensive." -Bones/Village Voice


Dark Dreams: The Prints of Francisco Goya at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, NJ) (-Dec. 14)

"...should not be missed by anybody with a serious interest in the visual arts. The show presents two complete sets of Goya’s print series, 'Los Caprichos' ('The Caprices') and 'Los Disparates' (most commonly, and loosely, translated as 'The Follies'). ...they represent the pinnacle of his technical and creative achievement as an artist. Without them it is very likely that he would not have achieved his exalted place in art history." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


George Segal: Modernist Humanist at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ) (-Dec. 11)

"Few artists have been more consistently out of sync with their times than George Segal, the South Brunswick-based sculptor who died in 2000 at the age of 75. But on the evidence of the small but lovely retrospective of his work at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University, it seems that at long last his historical moment may have arrived. For 50 years, Mr. Segal practiced what might be called psychological realism. His figurative sculptures and 'environments,' tableaux that combine cast-plaster figures with everyday objects, a genre he pioneered in the 1960s, are big, blunt and fragmentary representations of the human condition. With realism now widely in vogue, Mr. Segal increasingly seems prescient." -Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes


Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008 at the Baltimore Museum (-Jan. 4)

"...a gentle anarchist whose audience-friendly works anticipated—and considerably outshine—the recent vogue of 'relational aesthetics' in international art. ... West’s please-touch-me objects dependably entertain but never seem trivial. ... His art enlists, rather than addresses, its viewers. His best-known works are the 'Adaptives' ('Passstücke,' also translatable as 'Prostheses'), which he started making in 1974: odd-shaped, white-painted lumps of papier-mâché on bent steel rods, vaguely Giacometti-esque in look. They are meant to be handled. To pick one up is to become a self-conscious performer, improvising ways to hold, wield, or wear it. ... West’s startlingly comfortable sofas, in welded rebar and cushioned or carpet-draped steel mesh, precipitate a vision of society at once domestic and public, in which everyone is both a spectator and a spectacle. ... West’s recent abstract, painted-aluminum sculptures—successors to his coarse but fragile, galumphing forms in papier-mâché—may be the most energetic and affable art for public spaces since Alexander Calder." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"West's sculptures are like theatrical props, the gallery is the stage they decorate, and you're on set as the star of the production. ... Lewis Carroll gave us talking chess pieces and playing-card gardeners. West gives us us, as sculptural elements. ... I don't think anything West makes could work without the surrealist precedent -- without a whole bunch of artistic precedents he's playing with. That's because with West, we're not entering any old alternate universe. We're entering the alternate universe already set up in other works of art." -Blake Gopnik/Washington Post

"Critics have used phrases such as 'artfully awkward' and 'clumsy elegance' to describe his work. If his sculptures were characters in a play, they would be Gogo and Didi, the hapless protagonists of Waiting for Godot. They give off the impression of the clownish interloper who doesn't quite fit in with his refined surroundings, the underdressed dinner guest who didn't realize the invitation called for black tie." -Edward Gunts/Baltimore Sun

"He obviously was influenced by the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, in which Italian artists used common objects that spoke to everyday life. The so-called Happenings taking place in that decade also influenced him, because this performance-based movement made no distinction between art and props. ... -Mike Giuliano/Howard County Times

"West is well known for rejecting the typical museum-going experience. His work consciously tries to break the barrier between the artist and the viewer by creating work that is interactive and engaging, thereby making the viewer a part of the art. His work is also demonstratively colorful and playful, exploring a variety of sizes, color palates and media; the playfulness acts as an attempt to make sculpture a social experience. This exhibit is marked by the playground-like quality that permeates West's body of work." -Chloe Mark/Johns Hopkins News-Letter


William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005 at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design's Bakalar Gallery (Boston) (-Dec. 6)

"William Christenberry locates his photographs at the intersection of simplicity and profundity. His enduring concerns are the interplay between the eternal and ephemeral; the passage of time generally; and how that interplay and passage figure in the rural Alabama where he grew up and which he's photographed for nearly half a century. Christenberry is one of the great visual chroniclers of the South, very much an heir of Walker Evans and counterpart of his friend and fellow colorist William Eggleston." -Mark Feeney/Boston Globe


Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams, MA) (-2033)

"Sol LeWitt was at the forefront of two of the 20th century's most esoteric and alienating art movements, Minimalism and Conceptualism, yet he somehow managed to keep his own work as crowd-pleasing and hypoallergenic as a Goldendoodle. ... ...as wonderful as anything I've seen in years. It will be staying in place for at least a quarter-century, over which period it is sure to become a site of pilgrimage for all those susceptible to the proposition that life can be beautiful as well as absurd. ... I felt like a little boy watching a mile-long freight train rattle past, each car holding some new, un-guessed-at enchantment. ... Many of the early works on the ground floor are in fine pencil; they feel as austere and otherworldly as distant galaxies. Others, in ink wash or acrylic paints, are so big, bold, and emphatically present they virtually snap their heels and salute. ... LeWitt's great contribution was to lighten the burden of expectation artworks had to carry. In this, irony became his ally. He relished various contradictions: between, for instance, the simplicity of his own 'ideas' and the (in many cases) devilish complexity of their execution. I think he also enjoyed the tension between the cold inflexibility of the logic he employed and the emotional experience it could give rise to." -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered at the National Gallery of Art (-Jan. 11)

"Lievens (1607-74) is not a household name now, but in his time he was famous throughout northern Europe for his portraits and his religious and history paintings. Today his main claim to fame is his friendship with Rembrandt, who was a year older. ... Why Lievens did not become something more than a skilled journeyman is a matter of conjecture. Did premature success throw off his development? Did he diversify too much? Was his peripatetic life a distraction?" -Ken Johnson/NYTimes


The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (-Jan. 11)

"Last year he sold the Hirshhorn a coherent piece of his collection, open in its mood and subdued in its colors. The museum wisely chose an important early drawing by Sol LeWitt (the artist conceived hundreds; Panza's is the third), two also important, also early aerated Robert Irwins (one, a painted canvas, seems to show a glowing fog of bright dissolving dots) and exemplary pieces by Larry Bell and Richard Long, On Karawa, Joseph Kosuth -- 39 things in all, by 16 different artists. A good buy. Panza's finest pieces carry a stately, cool austerity. They re-balance the collection of the museum on the Mall. ... One virtue of the Hirshhorn's Panza acquisition is how tellingly it maps that key mid-'60s moment when conceptualism and minimalism joined. ... Much of Panza's art is crisp and fine, but not all of it. What dims his exhibition, at least for me, is its excessive wordiness. Half its works of art depend -- this long has been a drag on conceptualism's ambitions -- on words we're meant to read." -Paul Richard/Washington Post


Prospect.1 (New Orleans)

"New Orleans has joined the biennial rush with Prospect.1, the sprawling exhibition that opened across the city over the weekend. With a roster of nearly 80 artists, this show has an unsurprising mix of good, bad and phoned-in art. But it is also a testing ground with little in the way of way of superstars, big curatorial egos and elaborately produced works, and none of the vast, chilling art halls endemic in biennials." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes at the de Young Museum (San Francisco) (-Jan. 18)

"...a stunning collection of recent and brand-new works that explore what the New York–based artist describes as the 'notions of landscape and geologic phenomena.' ... Lin’s second nationally traveling exhibit within 10 years, ranges from a 50-ton sculpture created by 65,000 pieces of 2x4 set on their ends (2x4 Landscape) to Rand McNally into which Lin has cut through page by page to create new fictional landscapes that feature canyons through France and a valley in southeast Brazil that bottoms out as a lake (Atlas Landscape series)." -Miyoko Ohtake/Dwell

Turner Prize 08 at the Tate Britain (London) (-Jan. 18)

"Turn up, tune in and drop off. That’s the mood of the Turner Prize exhibition this year. This award once played an important role in British culture, pulling contemporary artists out of their studios and putting them on the public stage. They may, as often as not, have been pelted with metaphorical eggs. But at least that was a sign of critical life. ... The Brit pack’s visual one-liners, the short, sharp clarity of their shock, begin to feel positively cosy when compared with the confusing installations with which we now have to come to terms. These are not artworks in any traditional sense. They seem far less about objects than the connections between objects. They leave you to do the thinking. ... And I can't help thinking that this show will prove more like the returns desk of Ikea on a Monday morning. Lots of frustrated people will be left staring at a pile of inscrutable junk." -Rachel Campbell-Johnston/Times of London


More Reviews:
Vermeer's "A Lady Writing" at the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, CA) (-Feb. 2) -Suzanne Muchnic/LATimes

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum -Edward Rothstein/NYTimes

An Iconography of Contagion An Exhibition of 20th-Century Health Posters at the National Library of Medicine (Washington, D.C.) (-Dec. 19) - Amanda Schaffer/NYTimes

Tornadoes Paintings by John Brosio at the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.) (-Jan. 19) -Jessica Dawson/Washington Post

Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids at the Museum of Science (Boston) (-March 22) -Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe

This is War! Robert Capa at Work/Gerda Taro: A Retrospective at the Barbican (London) (-Jan 25) -Sean O'Hagan/Guardian

Babylon: Myth and Reality at the British Museum (London) (-March 15) -Waldemar Januszczak/Times of London