Review Roundup

The Newseum (Washington, D.C.)

"...a publicity-seeking monument to the news business, its history and its hyperlinked future ... as if an overstuffed newspaper Sunday supplement from the not-so-distant past had suddenly morphed into a sound-and-light display." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes

"Despite its lofty tone, the design reeks of parochialism, not bold ideas. Its galleries, stuffed with mostly superficial exhibitions, seem engineered to accelerate the flow of crowds rather than for patient contemplation. If the building reveals anything about the state of journalism today, it conveys the industry’s anxieties over the shrinking attention span of the average American." - Nicolai Ouroussoff/NYTimes

"It's easy to see the Newseum as a monument to old-school self-regard at precisely the moment when venerable news organizations struggle to transform themselves. A visit will make you wonder who will tell these stories if 'old' media doesn't." - James S. Russell/Bloomberg


Tomma Abts at The New Museum

"...quiet, spare and luminous... ...the opposite of showy. They have a nerdy, introverted spirit." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


SANAA: Works 1998-2008 at The New Museum

"...a show housed in a major work by the same designers it highlights has built-in advantages... Wisely, the current SANAA show avoids the self-congratulatory air... these three-dimensional renderings capture the spirit of SANAA's minimalist approach to perfection." - Martin Filler/Culture Grrl


Whitney Biennial

"...indicative of a cultural landscape that has grown so fat by self-cannibalization that its guts have burst open splattering the walls of the temple of art with a feculence regurgitated so many times over that we can no longer trace its origin. " - David Markus/Brooklyn Rail

"...numerous half-baked ideas, over-thought instances of ingrown hermeticism, and good, old-fashioned narcissism. I mean, it's supposed to be American, right?" - S.C.Squibb/Art Cal Zine


Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum

"Since art history is most productively seen as a braid with several strands, it is obvious that Koons first and now Murakami have ended the Pop occultation. Murakami has appropriated image types and even themes from Japanese popular culture and used them to create a weird, off-center language to address fecundity, mortality, infantilism, and, yes, commerce." - John Perreault/Artopia

Archive Fever at the ICP

"It is an incredibly unfrivolous show... a web of references to and reenactments of revolutions, civil wars, segregation and deprivation. ... Putting the manipulation of an archive at the forefront, right alongside its own contents, is one of the greatest points Enwezor makes." - Susannah Edelbaum/ArtCal Zine


Korean Painted Screens at the Met

"...tightly focused... marvelous examples of ch’aekkori painting alongside related decorative objects from the permanent collection." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation at the Berkshire Museum (MA)

"This could be the only place where 18th-century Shakers (whose nearby farm is still worth a visit) are as celebrated as the Pittsfield plastics industry ...jumbling of the first-rate and second-rate..." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Collages of John Evans and Art of May Wilson at the Morris Museum (NJ)

"a thoughtful pairing, for each contributed significantly to the history of collage and assemblage in 20th-century American art." - Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes