Reviews Roundup: Younger Than Jesus

Faye Driscoll, "Loneliness," 2006, Video

The Generational: Younger Than Jesus
The New Museum
April 8 - July 5, 2009

"The show is low-budget bubbly fun, for the most part—and noisy, what with all the videos and sound pieces. ... Gone are the days, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when deconstruction-smitten academics and artists toiled to share their discovery that media and institutions are—get ready—manipulative. Viscerally sophisticated young artists are more interested in playing with materials and contexts that are purely gratuitous, or, at least, too anarchic or too desultory to be marshalled for or against any commercial interest or political tendency. ... Remember Gilda Radner’s character Emily Litella, on the old 'Saturday Night Live,' who chirped 'Never mind' when misunderstandings that had sparked her angry rants were pointed out to her? Thinking of that joke helped me focus on a quality of whipsaw humor that is rife in 'Jesus.' Call it 'never-mindedness,' a sort of booby-trapped cocksureness, foreseen by Nirvana. ... ...four decades after the first portable videotape recorder became available, video has become a studio tool that’s as second nature as pencils. Little by little, it has stolen fire from film, photography, theatre, concert performance, painting (with projections as murals), drawing (with animation), and, of course, television, exhaustively unpacking the history and the semiotics of the home screen." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"The show suggests that ideas about culture, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology, YouTube and Facebook, and science and documentary film have all become more important than October magazine postmodernism. Sociology is the new black. None of these artists is trying to advance the teleological ball or invent new forms. They’re investigating the whole world, not just the art world. Their work is less about how we affect time and people than about how time and people affect us. ... That’s a welcome switch from the super-self-conscious, highly educated, insular art of the recent past. The best artists in 'Younger' turn their gaze from their own belly buttons to gaze at other people’s belly buttons. ... 'Younger Than Jesus' indicates that the alchemical essence known as the sublime, the primal buzz of it all, is no longer in God or nature or abstraction. These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. Art is being reanimated by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is breaking free." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.

"The organic, permissive vibe, projecting a core idea that the Museum is listening to the young, makes Younger Than Jesus feel like a laid-back parent, a cool dad. The work and the way it's put together is emphatically inconclusive, comfortable with the fruit of its own sophistication and conviction while entirely lacking in lessons or spittle-spattering theoretical bluster. ... These young artists are not raging, freaking out or self-destructing, because there's no cell they can't get out of. For all its pleasures, the measured coziness of Younger Than Jesus is synthetic and temporary." -Bones/Village Voice

"Big-statement surveys generate big expectations: they will tell us what and who is hot, important, exciting. What we get in this case is a serious, carefully considered show, but one that, apart from a few magnetic stand-alone entries — a killer video by Cyprien Gaillard, an animation by Wojciech Bakowski, a madcap Ryan Trecartin installation — feels awfully sedate and buttoned-down for a youthfest. ... ...even with the introduction of some new names, 'Younger Than Jesus' feels familiar, like a more-substantial-than- average version of a weekend gallery hop in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, right down to the token Asian and African imports. ... ...raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"Guilt-free voyeurism and exhibitionism are common threads among the works by 50 international artists born after 1976 (hence the title reference to Jesus, crucified at 33). No surprise here. This crowd grew up in an era where it’s perfectly acceptable to share the most intimate or mundane details of your life on the Internet. There’s not much rebellion in 'Younger Than Jesus.' This cyber-savvy generation instead remixes vast quantities of visual information from all kinds of sources to construct its own reality, all to spirited effect. ... Many of the artists have an affinity for videos that either dwell on images of ultimate doom or move at time-warped speed while playing thumping music." -Katya Kazakina/Bloomberg

"The New Museum itself is nothing more than a giant Xbox, and the art within it arranged without any sense of individuality or distinction. ... The art itself ached for anonymity and the cover of the crowd. Many of the conventions of World of Warcraft are observed, especially role-playing and costume. ... What's remarkable about this show is how neat and clean everything is, even the innumerable AbEx ripoffs by artists too skill-deprived to name, as primly displayed as those of a fourth-grade classroom. ... I have never seen a show like it before. It is antiseptic, safe, death to hierarchies of taste and distinctions of talent, and yet determined to neutralize our eyes with an overload of useless information." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"...when, exactly, did it become mandatory to display contemporary art in high volume, whether in shows like this one or at art fairs? When did Costco become the template? ... ...there's the New Museum's SANAA-designed edifice, which, as everyone in the art world knows, has horribly proportioned galleries. Ordinarily a minus, the spaces flatter the work; after all, if the museum's interior makes it look like an amateur institution, you're less likely to notice the amateurishness of the art. ... ...when people confuse innovation with youth, it's not because of any factual symmetry, but because they want their emerging artists pink-cheeked and easy on the eyes. For a cattle call like this one, veal is preferable to beef. ... If their work is distinguished by anything at all, it is a resolve to simply cope with the situation rather than challenge it, and the strategies they've adopted to do that run a gamut from intriguing to annoying. ... 'Younger than Jesus' proposes that the only sustainable model for culture going forward is one that runs on a hybrid drivetrain. That's hardly a new idea, but for all of its faults, the show undeniably crackles with a quality that recent Biennials have sorely lacked: Electricity." -Howard Halle/TONY

"The New Museum turned 32 this year. And as Massimiliano Gioni, its director of special exhibitions, himself only 33, suggested at the press preview for 'The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,' the museum has more than a bit of self-consciousness about age—specifically, its transformation from young upstart housed in a crumbling Soho warehouse to an institution entrenched in a chic stack of concrete blocks. ... ...like the stereotypical kid of the millennial generation, 'Younger Than Jesus' is globally focused, pushy beyond its abilities, and eager to draw attention to itself despite a deficiency of substance." -James Hannaham/Village Voice

Reviews Roundup: Martin Kippenberger

“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective”
Museum of Modern Art
-May 11

"The career of the German artist Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at 44, was a brief, bold, foot-to-the-floor episode of driving under the influence. What was he high on? Alcohol, ambition, disobedience, motion, compulsive sociability, history and art in its many forms. ... In every sense he took up a lot of space. And he continues to do so at the Museum of Modern Art, where his first — and excellent — American retrospective, 'Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,' is spilling out of top-floor galleries and down into the atrium. ... At punk bars and biennials he was the juiced-up guy who made scintillating speeches, picked stupid fights and periodically dropped his pants. He was the same person in his art. ... He knew that there are no small parts, only timid actors, and that with the right spices scraps make a great meal. In other words, he knew he had to take what was there, including the diminished role of the artist, and make something different, and large, and loud from it, and he did. ... He made his painting a database of art and ideas that he loved and despised: Socialist Realism, Picasso, Picabia, Nazi propaganda, punk, Pop, Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke and consumer culture, as well as concepts like progress, originality, consistency, success and failure. He customized Neo-Expressionism, hot in Germany in the 1980s, into a klutzy, jokey style, all flat-footed brushwork and snide asides. ... If messy and raucous aren’t your thing, and tidy objects are, Kippenberger is not for you. Sometimes when I come up against his drunk-and-disorderly divahood I think he’s not for me. But he is, absolutely, or the idea of him is, meaning the model he sets for what an artist can be and do. His multitudinous recyclings, insubordinate temperament and generosity seem unexpectedly right for a non-party-time time." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"Martin Kippenberger cultivated failure. The German artist’s life was littered with half-baked or misconceived projects soaked in self-indulgent irony. An unfinished series of black-and-white paintings marks the beginning of a career that would follow many paths towards a series of dead ends. Talented as he was, Kippenberger, who was 44 when he died in 1997, had little discipline and no follow-through. The retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art left me agog at all this squandered potential. ... To appreciate his work requires a high level of you-had-to-be-there tolerance, since so much of it consists of inside jokes about the German art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. These attacks might have come clearer if MoMA had included some of his victims in the show; without that context, Kippenberger’s art devolves into a scattering of childish jabs. ... I came away not shocked, not shaken or enlightened, but merely dismayed by a sensibility so pickled in acid. Much is made in the show of his puckish humour but in truth his grandest statements were acts of petty enmity – saturnine comments on artists more talented than he." -Ariella Budick/FT

"The curators, Ann Goldstein and Ann Temkin, were shutting down the awful academic echo chamber that has tried to turn Kippenberger into one cutout caricature or another: cagey gamesman, aesthetic tinkerer, fun drunk, anti-hero. They let his insurrectionary freedom and radicalism come out. ... the curators give us Kippenberger the bacchanalian art-making machine, hanging several hundred works, some in dim nooks or high on walls. A lamppost sculpture with a Santa hat occupies the space usually held by Rodin’s Balzac. This is the most alive the new MoMA has looked, and it puts the overriding content of Kippenberger’s work into sharp focus: inner necessity, a frenzy against control, the need to pulverize clichés, and desperation built upon the fear of a short life. Most important, he was comfortable holding seemingly contradictory positions at once. Kippenberger instinctively grasped that ideologies and hierarchies were moribund, that formalism and technique are flexible, and that one can be idealistic without being utopian." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag. (And don't miss Jerry's video about the show.)

"The ideal show from Kippy would consist of nothing but self-portraits, and these are included in a needlessly exhaustive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. These kind of comprehensive trunk shows, vomiting forth every piece and expert on a particular artist, have become a regular irritant at the new MoMA, bludgeoning the public with too much information. ... His self-portrait paintings are worthy of Ingres. Kippenberger is a massive, brooding, sly, mildly dyspeptic yet mirthful beast, both shamus and shaman. To look at his hirsute mug is to imagine a thousand others like him; to me, for example, he resembles Rod Steiger, Saddam Hussein and Bill Arning." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"Kippenberger died of liver cancer in 1997, at the age of forty-four, but by that time he had created enough paintings, sculpture, drawings, installations, photographs, posters, books, and whatnot to furnish several ordinary lifetime careers, and enough distraction, as a globe-trotting carouser, to make it marvellous that he produced anything at all. ... He was extrodinarily intelligent as well as gifted, especially in drawing. But nothing he made has the inevitable feeling of satifying art. The hundreds of pictures and objects at MOMA seem undermotivated or supererogatory, leaning on tortured concepts, obscure inside-jokes, and random impulses. Why, then, does the show...exude a distinct, hard-to-deny majesty? I think that it's because Kippenberger’s career, as a whole, was consciously his one actual work: it both epitomizes and burlesques the art game’s pell-mell institutional, commercial, and academic expansion in the biennial-bedizened nineteen-eighties and nineties. ... Toward the end of his life, he planned a network of ostensibly, fully-outfitted subway station entrances at seven points on the globe -- suggesting the existance of a planatary underground system -- with motorized airvents at sites in between. He finished three, in Leipzig, Germany; Syros, Greece; and Dawson City in the Yukon. That project's forced wit and laborious execution are echt Kippenberger: faintly amusing and patently obvious. His best critic, the German Diedrich Diederichsen, nails the effect--or is it syndrome?--in the show's excellent catelog, as that of artists whose aim is to 'make art a deeply embarassing affair.' It sometimes seems that for an idea to be viable to Kippenberger it has to reek of hapless mediocrity. ... There are few other artists so richly deserved by their times." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"Kippenberger's practice--art about making art but also always about Kippenberger--was forever changing shape, and the exhibition aims to show its every mutation. There are paintings executed in scores of styles, many painted by others and many that beg to be sculptures, out-and-out sculptures, and sculptural installation. The exhibition is punctuated with tall walls littered with dozens of drawings that occasionally begin to tickle as ephemera, and numberless examples of the artist's publications, show invitations and posters that could qualify, in the artist's estimation, as 'a good Kippenberger.' ... The work is by turns loose, macho, funny and obnoxious, usually messy, and rarely beautiful in any conventional sense. Expressionistic is the closest art-historical term that suits it, visually. Theoretical definitions are wobblier still. The work has proven adaptable and unbound by any pre-existing rules. Put simply, he fit, and continues to fit, anywhere." -Bones/Village Voice

"He set the stage for many of the artists included in last year’s Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s 'Unmonumental' exhibitions. While these shows featured plenty of found objects and non- art materials made to look like art, they missed the urgency and rebelliousness that makes Kippenberger still cutting-edge and relevant 12 years after his death." -Katya Kazakina/Bloomberg

Review: Vic Muniz and Pipilotti Rist at MoMA

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (–Feb. 2)
Artist's Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus (-Feb 23)

Two shows at the MoMA aim to enhance our museum experience and expand our minds. Pipilotti Rist has totally transformed the 2nd floor atrium into a womb room that comforts as it attunes our body to the experience of visual sensation. Vik Muniz offers a visual puzzle that pushes our understanding of art and its connections to other art and the world.

Muniz is the ninth artist invited to guest curate a MoMA show. Known for his technical proficiency and wit -- think of his photograph of a Mona Lisa made of peanut butter -- Muniz also takes a clever tact as curator. He's created what he calls rebus, a kind of visual puzzle where meanings are created combining one or more objects. He's fashioned connections between all manner of objects, including some fun picks from the design department. A 1963 venetian blind is paired with the bars of a prison window (a Robert Gober installation), in turn matched to a Doris Ulmann photograph of a chain gang outfitted in striped prison uniforms. Later on, a photograph by Joel Sternfeld shows children's toys littered on a landscape, leading us to, what else, but Legos and a Rubik's cube, which then takes us to a African-inspired Giacometti figure whose outstretched hands you could imagine twisting and turning the plastic puzzle. Muniz wisely dispenses with wall labels. Instead you're given a poster-sized index of all 82 objects. I recommend bringing a pen so you can connect all the dots.

Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist makes dreamlike meditations on gender, sexuality and the body. For "Pour Your Body Out," MoMA's atrium space is enclosed in pink curtains and covered in carpeting. Visitors wanting to sprawl out on a large eye-shaped sofa are told to remove their shoes. (It must be a socks moment in the art world. The Gugg's "anyspacewhatever" also has a shoe-free zone.) On the day I was there, there was an impromptu kindergarten in the area inside the sofas, with little ones toddling around in a way that seemed in keeping with the art. In fact, the wall text encourages dancing and singing. Projected onto three large walls is a 10-minute looping video. It's a hallucinogenic hayride that loosely follows a woman she as she gets her feet wet in a dirty puddle, plunges underwater, then crawls naked through a field miming a wild boar. With a super-saturated palate and reassuring New Age soundtrack, its part Björk video, part Teletubbies episode.

You might compare what the two artists are doing to the effects of drugs. Muniz is like Ritalin, concentrating the mind and creating cognitive leaps, and Rist is like magic mushrooms, making a sensous space that bridges body and mind.

Review: Street Art Street Life at the Bronx Museum

Still from Yoko Ono and John Lennon's "Rape" (1968)

Street Art Street Life at the Bronx Museum
Sept. 14, 2008 - Jan. 25, 2009

First let's get the title out of the way. There's no "street art" on display at the Bronx Museum. OK, a few photos of some Basquiat "Samo" tags from the 80s, but there isn't a Banksy, Faile or Swoon to be seen. Instead, what we have is a 50-year look back at some established artists' takes on the urban experience -- with an emphasis on photography, performance and protest.

For street photographers, we start with the big three: Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winnogrand, and their magical images documenting the loneliness, romance and curious corners of our urban environs. The show's contemporary shooters mainly falls short, either too antiseptic -- Sze Tsung Leong -- or sloppy -- Xaviera Simmons. More satisfying is a collection by Francis Alys of several dozen black & white commercial street pics taken in Mexico City in the 40s, 50s and 60s.

The street is also a place for performance. The Fluxus collective pioneered a playful style of street theater in the 60s; the show has photos of a guided tour by Nam June Paik, and a ballet performed on a fire escape (wish there was video of this one). Other examples of street performance have a musical element. Most memorable is a joyful video called "Ear to the Ground" by David Van Tieghem showing him dancing and drumming on everything from streetlights to stop signs and payphones (check it out here). A video by Daniel Guzmán shows the artist and his friend doing a parody of a goofy 80s-style video set to the Ace Freely song "New York Groove" (it was also recently on display at the New Museum, and can be seen here). A David Hammons video is more foreboding: we see a dark screen with sound of him kicking a bucket down a street.

Other performances dealt with aspects of the urban condition. Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh lived on the streets of New York City for an entire year, following self-imposed stricture to never seek shelter, compromised only once when he spent a night in jail. The photos of Nikki S. Lee document her efforts to assume the identities of various urban subgroups, such as a St. Mark's punk and an Asian grandma. Artist Kimsooja takes poetic video of herself standing absolutely still in busy streets in Mexico City, London, etc.

There is more overtly political art on display, such as two slideshows: London-based Nils Norman's images of the "vernacular of terror" (images of CCTVs, car-bomb barriers disguised as planters, metal teeth on ledges designed to keep the homeless, etc.) and Allan Sekula's "Waiting for the Teargas," which highlights the drama of the "Battle for Seattle" protest against the WTO in 1999.

But most rewarding is the show's focus on the intersection of feminism and the street. This includes Valerie Export's actions where she leads a man on a leash like a dog and another called "Touch Cinema" in which she invites men to fondle her breasts. "Rape," a film by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, shows us a camera crew as they follow a women as if undertaking a sexual assult. Vito Acconci accounts in text and photos how he followed women and men for a period. Sophie Calle does the opposite, hiring a private detective to tail her for a day (the detective's notes and photographs are the piece). More contemporary is the the activist-oriented Blank Noise Project, which contributes a video work documenting "Eve teasing" in India. Two video monitors face off with opposing views -- women sharing how they had been harassed vs. men and and a few women blaming the women for wearing provocative clothing (more here).

I wonder if the show could have included something on that professional denizen of the streets, the prostitute. P.S.1's amazing feminist history of last year, "WACK!," featured Suzanne Lacy's "Prostitution Notes," which maps the artist's efforts to learn about the lives prostitutes.

"Street Art Street Life" addresses the unmediated experience of the individual with the street. No subways, stores or supermarkets. Also, no suburbs. But while the work pounds the pavement, it doesn't have much grit. Nearly everything has a careful conceptual framework or agenda. And because the show covers such a big subject and broad time-frame, it feels crowded with big names and greatest hits. These factors leave street romantics like Keith Haring and Swoon on the sidelines. That said, I enjoyed this show, which is anything but pedestrian.

Reviews Roundup: Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA

Installation view of Models (1994. Ink and chalk on paper. 100 drawings)

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave at the MoMA (-Feb. 16)

"Ms. Dumas’s work tends to aim for the solar plexus, as the show’s morbid title suggests. Fusing the political and the painterly, it grapples with the complexities of image making, the human soul, sexuality, the beauty of art, the masculinity of traditional painting, the ugliness of social oppression. How much it delivers on these scores is a question that this exhibition doesn’t quite answer. The show suggests that while this amply talented artist has created some riveting images, her work becomes monotonous and obvious when seen in bulk. ... The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually too close to the surface, which makes it all look too easy. Worse, it makes subject matter paramount." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"The impressions are emotional. A Dumas retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Cornelia Butler, affected me slowly at first, then in a rush, overcoming a resistance I’ve had to Dumas’s fast and loose, insouciantly ugly pictures, almost all of which are based on photographs of corpses, torture victims, terrorists (Osama bin Laden looking crafty and sensual), pornographically posed nudes, gawky children, and endless anonymous, discontented faces. ... I became fascinated by the refusal of Dumas’s art to let me admire it, despite passages of whiplash drawing worthy of Edvard Munch and a quakingly tender way with incidental colors (pinks, creams, turquoise). The art historian Richard Shiff’s surprising comparison, in the show’s catalogue, of Dumas’s method with that of Willem de Kooning adds up. Like that great Dutchman, she draws in a manner opposed to drawing’s descriptive function, keeping her line loose and a-crackle, in gladiatorial combat with the subjects that occasion it. ... Her art rarely conveys feeling so much as excites it and then absorbs it, to the benefit of the work’s authority. She doesn’t give; she takes. This turns out to be a fair deal, which alerts us to our own untapped emotions. The experience of sheerly responding pleases." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"If the dead don’t look much different than the living here, it is because the departed have only one expression. Like Dumas’s haunting art, it is likely to remain in the mind long after the bearer is gone." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"A trademark Dumas canvas melds frigid existentialism with a heated, painterly passion. We’re repelled by its chill, captured by its glow—and end up caught in a Dumasian gravitational pull." -Kate Lowenstein/TONY

"Not since its obsession with Pavel Tchelitchev in the 1930s has the Museum of Modern Art exhibited, in depth, an artist of such irredeemable mediocrity as Marlene Dumas. The 150 pieces spread across two floors are so devoid of true color, pictorial skill, new ideas and pleasure of any kind, positive or negative, that I found myself, at the opening Wednesday night, desperately searching the crowd, whose faces, as on a bad acid trip, seemed joined to Dumas’ bulbous visages, for things of visual interest. ... The Dumas method is simple: She borrowed Francesco Clemente’s overused gouache technique and perved it up. Her subjects are burnished to dullness by her pathetic brush handling. There are some rear shots of masturbation, a blowzy self-portrait, the groups of schoolmates and bridesmaids, in which she throws in a freaky grin or stern look for variety." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"As you might expect of portraits without sitters, there is an internalized aspect to Dumas' work. This is an artist searching for icons of her own emotions, so she simplifies form, creating a rapid notational style for the figure itself. Pictures of the full body tend to be slapdash, and more about the body as a commodity or dead fact, but the faces get Dumas' full attention. She hangs no drapes before the windows to the soul." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger

"At MoMA, in galleries filled with painted bodies – dead, tortured or writhing in simulated ecstasy – I overheard one insider confide to another that he hoped the economic slump might sweep away all the glitter that has clung to the Dumas brand and reveal her as the great virtuoso she had always been. I was thinking along similar lines but came to a different conclusion. I imagine that once Dumas loses her quantifiable status, she will fade into the nether reaches of art history, a curiosity of the crazy boom years. ... Spread over two floors, the show tracks the non-development of an artist who discovered both her style and her subjects early on and then continued to plumb their shallows over ensuing decades. ... She covers some of the same terrain as Leon Golub, whose immense paintings of torturers, war criminals, and massacres argue that only a fine line of circumstance separates victim from perpetrator. Dumas gestures wispily in the same direction but she lack Golub’s rhetorical force. She is a mistress of the limp provocation and the mild shock." -Ariella Budick/FT

"So why does Marlene Dumas's painting, appropriated from this loaded image, feel inert and facile? Tiny splatters of blue-gray paint flatten any sense of the sagging weight of inanimate flesh, and the smudged background offers none of the documentary interest the police photographer's scribbled notations lend to the original. ... Part of the buzz around Dumas's work concerns her transformation of source photos into purely painterly forms that supposedly double back and blindside us with emotional content. But the fraught expanse that photographs create between viewer and grisly subject matter was strip-mined by Warhol for his 'Death and Disaster' series decades ago, and with more painterly aplomb." -R.C. Baker/Village Voice

"I mean, look at this ... It's like there's no paint on the canvas at all. There's so much restraint, and the details are all so beautiful. Just look at the nipples. The work is so careful. ... there's a lot of explicit stuff that I wouldn't have the nerve to do ... It's sexy and not vulgar ... Like Titian's nudes are very sexy, and Titian's drawings, you know? A lot of tits in your face. This goes to the edge of pornography." -Alex Katz via Andrew Goldstein/NY Mag.

"...we are witnessing the outcome of a vision that pushes into the edges that define what we should and should not see in a painting." -Sara Rose/AP

"Marlene Dumas' evocative and often provocative work, now on display at the Museum of Modern Art, is full of frightening beauty. These pictures by the South African native, now based in Amsterdam, bear brutal witness to news events and the contemporary condition." -Susan King/St. Petersburg Times

And the blogs!... Eyes Towards the Dove, James Mroy, Pink Pig NYC, Band of the Bes, Anaba, James Kalm. And, for good measure, a couple other much more timely roundups: Two Coats of Paint and Flavorwire.

Reviews Roundup: Art and Love in Renaissance Italy at the Met

"The Combat of Love and Chastity" by Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora (Florentine, 1444/45-1497), Probably 1480s, Tempera on panel, The National Gallery of Art, London

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (-Feb. 16)

"...offers continuous bodice-ripping and much evidence that romance has its price. The love-token-heavy show makes upper-crust Italians of the 15th and 16th centuries into libidinous serial divorcers who only courted, married and sired children to get the jewelry, ornamental jugs, commemorative plates, portraits, fertility objects and erotica with which they celebrated weddings, betrothals and birthdays. Full of marvelous gift ideas, especially for the rich and titled, the show’s first two galleries resemble the bridal registry at a Renaissance-era Neiman-Marcus. ... Aside from its appeal to carnal appetites and dangerous liaisons, this show, on the whole, is more chaste than lewd. Leaning heavily toward the scholarly and the saintly, it’s mostly prim and distant, disheveled rather than defiled. ... A show about fertility and romance should be more than mildly interesting or simply appreciative of the craft involved in it. Love is complicated and messy, while 'Art and Love' is just too neat." -Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"It promises romance, desire, youthful beauty, ritual, expensive gift items and possible sex in the land of Romeo and Juliet. It delivers on all counts. But the exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum, is not an unbroken string of masterpieces. It has its ups and downs, both visual and emotional. It mixes happy endings and cautionary tales and, toward its finish, throws in some Renaissance pornography. ... The works here reveal the ease with which Christian and neo-classical motifs mingled in secular arts during the Renaissance; the centrality of painting as both record and decoration; and the extent to which weddings were big business for artists who found themselves between religious commissions." -Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"The exhibition delved into the esoterica of 500-year-old wedding rites just as the issue of marriage itself surged into the news, with demonstrations and counter-protests all across America. ... While poets sang amorous lyrics and artists conjured sentimental scenes, real unions were governed by dowry negotiations and strategic alliances. The proof of a marriage's success was not happiness but heirs, whose status and destiny were mapped out years before their birth. ... The Met never mentions gay marriage, of course; the Renaissance would have found a same-sex ceremony preposterous. But the implications of all the deluxe paraphernalia is clear: that to consider marriage as a fixed and timeless practice is to miss its history of adapting to society's inconstant needs. At the same time, by documenting the rights and privileges that marriage can confer - the degree to which it binds people to the social order - the show explains why the current debate simply cannot be willed away." -Ariella Budick/FT

"It's in the decorative and printed arts that this exhibit surprises, coming alive with a gossipy, almost Boccaccio-like love of the commonplace." -Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger

"For the second time this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has felt it necessary to advise visitors to exercise parental discretion. Over the summer, a Courbet retrospective featured at least two works as pornographic as anything on the Internet." -James Gardner/WSJ

The exhibit's official site is here. In addition, the Met has no fewer that 19 videos on the exhibit, including an excellent talk by curator Andrea Bayer. Finally, blog posts by Radiocain, lowercaseletter and The Met Everyday.