As any cynic will tell you, a utopia is not only a perfect world, but it is also a purely imaginary one. And looking to the word’s etymology, there’s some truth to this contention: “Utopia” comes from the Greek ou, “not” and topos, “place,” and so beneath the term’s idealism, there is an underlying pathos—the […]

I first came across Nava Lubelski’s work in 2007, during open studios at CUE Art Foundation while she was a resident artist there. Her delicate and sinuous abstractions beckoned me from across the room. It was only up close that I realized they were not just made of paint, nor were they merely drawn. The […]

An abundance of conceptually informed exhibitions opened in New York in the space of three days at the end of October 2008, buoying the spirits in the wake of collapsing world economies. Consider that art is a language, intentions and materials, techniques, historical referents, among its parameters. The relational aesthetics, demonstrated by a core group […]

The project called “C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience),” installed in the museum’s Shaft Project Space, comprises the following: a series of looped videos on monitors in the closet-size gallery, with a driving instrumental sound track playing softly and piles of rainbow-dyed clothing stashed here and there; a projection, on a wall outside the museum, of […]

Guido van der Werve’s videos, currently on show at the Hayward Gallery, are the kind of thing art writers describe as ‘hilarious’, although they’re only hilarious in an art way, meaning that any laughs that do come are snorty expulsions easy to mistake for symptoms of the cold that everyone seems to have at the […]

José Parlá’s first New York solo exhibition is on the fourth floor of an old Soho loft building; a manually operated freight elevator takes you up to a space that has been cleared of its usual offering of furniture to make room for his paintings, works on paper and ceramics. Parlá began his career writing […]

It’s become a cliché to describe statement-making jewelry as “wearable art,” but no other term quite captures the personal adornments made by Alexander Calder. His earrings, necklaces and bracelets were mini-mobiles that dangled from the wrists, necks and earlobes of sophisticates like Peggy Guggenheim and Jeanne Moreau. The Whitney Museum’s current Calder show features room […]

In one of her many meditations on the taking of pictures, Susan Sontag wrote that “all photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable — that is, unforgettable.” Annie Leibovitz, Sontag’s lover before her death in 2004, says she doesn’t really “have a single favorite photograph” among those she’s taken; it’s her body of work, […]

Together Forever, a group show of four female artists on view at Broadway Gallery this past September, should be lauded for its unique approach to representations of identity and the relationship between the self and the other, as well as for its compelling presentation of four diverse and distinctive female voices that in concert harmonized […]

Arhan Virdi finds out what the deal is at the autumn 2008 Affordable Art Fair in London. We are used to hearing about the Damien Hirsts of this world whose works sell for millions to a very exclusive club, but what we don’t hear about is our flourishing end of the art market which is […]