Review Roundup

This week... Diane Keaton's photo collection at the ICP, Peter Schjeldahl's Koons nightmare, Jackie Wullschlager sends the Tate Modern's photo show to the firing squad, Dan Bischoff writes like a pirate, the National Academy Museum wakes up to installation art and Richard Lacayo heads back to Woodstock. Also, a shout-out to the super-talented Ariella Budick, who wrote us a note saying she's relocated from Newsday to the Financial Times. Congrats, Ariella!

Bill Wood’s Business at the ICP (-Sept. 7)

"...Bill Wood Jr. (1913-73), a commercial photographer who operated in Fort Worth from 1937 to the early 1970s... ...fascinating, compact.... organized by the independent curator and writer Marvin Heiferman and Diane Keaton, the actress, photographer and photography collector who 20 years ago bought 20,000 negatives left over from Mr. Wood’s defunct enterprise. Recently she donated the trove to the center. ... . It appears that he meant to create reassuring images for his customers, pictures that affirmed their identities, values and world. Today, however, it looks more as if he captured feelings of absurdity, unease, and grief. ...whether you attribute it to the curators, to a latent outsider genius in Mr. Wood, to the magical nature of photography or to all of the above, the exhibition conjures a haunting, dryly soulful visual poetry." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


The 183rd Annual at the National Academy Museum (-Sept. 7)

"If you emerged from the Whitney Biennial wondering where all the painting went, don’t despair. An alternative view of the state of contemporary art can be found at the National Academy’s annual exhibition. ... As often happens at the Whitney Biennial, a few galleries (Priska C. Juschka, Max Protetch and Sikkema Jenkins, among others) are represented by multiple artists. ... Site-specific projects, the bread and butter of the Biennial and other large group shows, are a relatively new concept here. ... Love them or hate them, the Academy’s annuals can seem like the art world’s last line of defense against the forces of youth, attitude and the market. That defense might be strengthened by a tighter display and a more relaxed definition of art." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria and Albert Museum at the Met (-Aug. 17)

"Gold, silver, ivory, pearls, garnets, emeralds and rock crystal are among the materials list for this show, and that makes sense because they are all, taken together, loot. The temptation to write about them in pirate talk is all but overwhelming -- Aaarrrrr!" - Dan Bischoff/Star-Ledger


Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing at the MoMA (-July 7)

"...the most exciting exhibition of drawings the Museum of Modern Art has produced in years... a delightfully unpredictable mix of about 100 works by two distinct groups: self-taught outsider artists and idiosyncratic but conventionally trained professionals, many of whom have been inspired by outsider art. ...by defying the usual hierarchies and cutting across standard academic categories, refreshes our relationship to the imperishable art of drawing." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


The Horse at the American Museum of Natural History (-Jan. 4)

"'The Horse' exhibit ends with the ... sound of thundering hooves, a horse sculpture made of Hawaiian ohia wood and cast in bronze, and some horse quotes, including the line from the 1971 Rolling Stones song: 'Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them someday.'" - Allison Freeman/Star-Ledger


Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum (-Sept. 21)

"...might more aptly have been dubbed 'Greenberg v. Rosenberg: Battle of the Self-Important Critics.' ... The show tracks the cantankerous pair until the philosophies outrun the philosophers, galloping towards logical consequences where neither man could follow. ... Ambling through this uneven anthology of Abstract Expressionism, it’s hard to recapture what all that ferment and variety would look like without the scrim of rhetoric." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times


Polaroids: Mapplethorpe at the Whitney (-Sept. 7)

"...small but packed little show... they reveal in Mapplethorpe a very different sensibility, one that had yet to form its mature, glistening carapace. Here, naked men lounge on rumpled sheets or pose on scarred wood floors, but they have not yet achieved the serenely masculine magnificence he would give them later on. ... using the Polaroid to bring his eye, his training and his sexuality into alignment, to reconcile New York bohemia and ancient Athens." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times


Philip Guston at the Morgan Library (-Aug. 31)

"Philip Guston spent most of his life battling himself. On one side of his psyche was marshalled his lust for an almost spiritual kind of purity. On the other stood a hunger to depict tangible stuff – books and sandwiches and the material evidence of a debased world. Every one of his images was splashed with the gore of this internal warfare; each represented an act of will and a form of surrender. ...chronicles his torment, revealing the way he tacked back and forth between the rarefied and the fleshly sides of his character." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times


Jeff Koons at the Met's roof garden (-Oct. 26)

"Intimations of irony always seem to lie just below the glossy, expensive surfaces of his sculptures. Is he mocking us even in the midst of seduction? Maybe, but I enjoy the equivocal come-on. The three new pieces ... teeter on the cusp of cuteness, exuding a delirious charm. Koons may be giggling at the art world's pretensions and the lavish gullibility of his collectors, but his mirth is infectious. The lollipop-coloured suite offers a light-hearted, nostalgic pleasure that's just right for the Met's panoramic eyrie." - Ariella Budick/Financial Times


Jeff Koons at the Met and at the MCA (Chicago) (-Sept. 21)

"There is something nightmarish about Jeff Koons. ... The material mastery, conceptual perfect pitch, and idealist beauty of most of the objects on display in Chicago defy resistance. ... Koons is hugely significant—grandly engaging themes of childhood, wealth, sex, and (as with an aqualung cast in bronze) death—while finally signifying precious little. That’s my nightmare: an intimation that intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark. ... It apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste. ... We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time." - Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker


Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul at the National Gallery (Washington, D.C.) (-Sept. 7)

"In 1988 a small group of the Kabul museum’s staff hid crates packed with about 600 of its most precious artworks in the vault of the presidential palace. No one was sure how these crates had fared until 2004, when they were retrieved with their contents intact. ... At once revelatory and heart-rending, this show, making a four-city American tour, has much to tell about Afghanistan, past and present. ... This show is, in a sense, a bundle of good news that only gets better. This triumphant exhibition makes us remember, while demonstrating that every survivor saves much more than just itself: long strands of culture, identity and history waiting to be woven back together." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Street & Studio at the Tate Modern (London) (-Aug. 31)

"...a sprawling mess. Not a vivid, enticing, mind-expanding mess, like life on the street, but a flat, meaningless jumble where masterpieces are squandered into incoherence, tiny images are dwarfed in towering galleries, colour prints over-glare at delicate monochromes, and rubbish is elevated to drop-dead-dull monumentality." - Jackie Wullschlager/Financial Times

Woodstock Museum (Bethel, NY)

"...I was one of the 400,000 or so people who converged on the place to attend something called the Woodstock festival. ... Now I was back, 39 years later--cue the wistful music--to visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, which is perched on the edge of the festival site and dedicated to telling the story of Woodstock and of the 1960s generally. ... Those three days of peace, love and mud have become the baby boomers' version of the Trojan War, their collective foundation myth. ... It's entertaining and briskly informative, filled with flat-screen TVs showing period footage and glass cases that hold things like old Jefferson Airplane album covers. I enjoyed it well enough." - Richard Lacayo/Time

"... housed in a lovely laminated wood structure built by a company that long ago built Mr. Yasgur’s silos... re-creation of Woodstock not as a vehicle for peace and love but as a vehicle for Sullivan County’s economic development. The site has become a $100 million arts center with a 15,000-seat outdoor performance space. ... But yea or nay, and it’s mostly yea... " - Peter Applebome/NYTimes

100 Years of Bakelite at the Mark Twain Library (Redding, CT) (-June 4)

"...the 100th anniversary of the invention of Bakelite with a show through June 4 of more than 300 colorful examples in its handsome mahogany vitrines. The variety of products on display includes telephones, radios, toy trains, jewelry and a bright red toilet seat from Denmark." - Wendy Moonan/NYTimes


Anish Kapoor at the ICA (Boston) (-Sept. 7)

"...sculpture as a kind of optical whirlpool, something that sucks you in and makes all your certainties vanish. ...entrancing... ...delights in challenging perceptual certainties... ...Kapoor's real knack is to make the many different materials he works with seem somehow other than sculptural. ...mind-bending, and oftentimes ravishing..." - Sebastian Smee/Boston Globe


Art After the Chicano Movement at LACMA (-Sept. 1)

"What's passing into history is an aesthetic that matured in the 1970s, produced by Mexican American artists with an eye toward articulation of Mexican American experience. A full generation later, what has arrived on the scene is something different -- an aesthetic produced by Mexican American artists with an eye toward articulating whatever they darn well please. ...a diverse and satisfying array of recent painting, sculpture, video, installation and mixed-media work. Sometimes the art is specific to questions of ethnic identity; often it's not. ...could easily pass for a Whitney Biennial. Come to think of it, I wish it were the Whitney Biennial. In our wired world of cultural tourism, that blandly punctilious New York survey of contemporary art has long since lost most of its reason for being. ... the show is gutsy (and correct) in asserting L.A. art's primacy for a significant slice of recent history." - Christopher Knight/LA Times


Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) (-Jan 11, 2009)
"Have we lost our humanity? The sober question animates the selection of 40 artists, six from Los Angeles... 'Life on Mars' is perceptive and slyly challenging in analyzing cultural politics, but it doesn't quite seem to recognize art's full-throated complicity in humanity's current discontents." - Christopher Knight/LA Times


Birth of the Cool at the Oakland Museum of California (-Aug. 17)

"The first thing visitors to the Oakland show encounter is a short film of spinning tops. That sets the meter for the whirl of paintings and photographs, furniture and pottery, music and animation clips to come." - Steven Winn/SF Chronicle


Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii at the Museum of Russian Art (Minneapolis) (-Sept. 13)

"He was a chemist by trade but developed a pioneering color-slide camera and, in the early 1900s, made more than 2,000 images of remote landscapes, industries, monasteries and people in the empire of Russia's last czar, Nicholas II. ... The exhibit testifies eloquently to the ingenuity of both artist and museum. In its exploration of Russian history and technology, and its celebration of an unsung talent ... is a smart program expansion at an institution founded less than a decade ago primarily to promote Soviet-era realist painting." - Star Tribune


Barbara Kruger's "Another" at the Stuart Collection on the University of California San Diego

"...vintage Kruger in style, with its grainy imagery and overlaid text, though less pointed than many of her works. It is suggestive rather than declaratory. The text is simple: two word blocks that read 'Another Day, Another Time, Another Loss, Another Dollar, Another Place, Another Time, Another Smile, Another Song and Another Sweater.' ...the wall mural lacks the conceptual punch and the visual vigor of her best work." - Robert L. Pincus/San Diego Union Tribune


Sparks! at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City) (-July 20)

"The entire installation sings with such thoughtful moments, highlighting formal relationships, shared themes and artistic influences among groupings of work. Yet, barring the spectacular El Anatsui tapestry of bottle tops, these new works continue along the low-key path established by earlier acquisitions of modern and contemporary art. Modest and nonconfrontational, it may suit Kansas City, but it also shelters visitors from the field’s grittier and more provocative manifestations." - Alice Thorson/Kansas City Star