- I’ll never understand why the New York Times ghettoizes art into (typically) just the Friday paper — it’s a backhanded shot at the role the paper thinks the arts play in a free society: leisure activity for the bourgeoisie rather than a point of intellectual engagement — but at least this past Friday’s was the best bunch of reviews the paper has run in a very long time. Roberta Smith rarely knocks New York institutions but went deep on Cindy Sherman — and on MoMA’s Cindy Sherman. Karen Rosenberg flat-out nailed the Morgan’s Dan Flavin drawings show and the John Chamberlain retrospective at the Guggenheim.
- RIP Ken Price. Christopher Knight’s obituary.
- In the LAT, Jori Finkel talks with John Baldessari, Tony Berlant, William Wegman and Andy Moses about the impact Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series had on them. The Diebenkorn Ocean Park survey I reviewed here just opened at the Orange County Museum of Art.
- In the Orange County Register, Richard Chang features the show.
- Sarah Sze? OK, whatevs.
- Alec Soth in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Martin Parr is the Jay-Z of documentary photography.“
- In the Village Voice, RC Baker wrote about pages from Terry Winters’s notebooks, on view now at Matthew Marks. In the NYT, Ken Johnson focused on the paintings.
On The Modern Art Notes Podcast, Winters and I did both: He’s this week’s guest! In the second segment, Morgan Library curator Isabelle Dervaux and I talk about her Flavin drawings show. Download the program, subscribe via iTunes, subscribe via RSS and/or view images from the show.
February 27, 2012, 7:18 am
Your complaint about the NYTimes concentrating its art coverage in the Friday edition seems out-of-touch to me. While you may be able to attend exhibitions and visit museums seven days a week, a great many of us must work Monday through Friday and sometimes on Saturdays. Having a Friday overview of new exhibitions helps me to plan the precious time I have away from my job. Because I can only do these things on weekends, you suggest the I and others in my situation are engageing in “leisure activity for the bourgeoisie.” That’s insulting and elitist on your part.
But you could do the same thing if the Times ran reviews/news-as-it-breaks seven days a week. Has nothing to do with elitism or anything else.