White opens the door to understanding, but it’s up to readers to grasp the fact that there may not really be any meaning....
Artist White draws on his long associations with academia and the art world to explain contemporary art to a confused public.
The author begins with a bit of recent art history and a look at how artists respond to the circumstances that their creative imaginations encounter. Devoting half the book to three extremely different artists—Dana Schutz, Mary Walling Blackburn and Stephen Kaltenbach—really drives home the concept of the boundlessness of the directions art can take. A hard look at MFA programs asks whether they are offering career training, a professional research program or economic preparation for the realities of art and the long odds of success. The author devotes considerable space to critiques in contemporary art. If the professors ask, “what are we looking for?” and “what do you want of me?” how is the unschooled public supposed to understand? Primarily, we must see that contemporary art is concerned with the immediate present and how meaning unfolds across time and space. Next, White tackles assistantships, both paid and unpaid, and the process of making art. An artist’s workshop used to be a training experience, but it is now, like Warhol’s, a factory. Industrial society has interrupted the direct line between the artist and the object. Now, an assistant develops a work by bending pipe or making a computer design. The movement toward regionalism, à la Grant Wood, and away from large art centers into the country, is again a new form of art. There are also performance, conceptual, social practice and minimalist art. The author’s most useful suggestion is to view a piece in the same state of mind (altered or not) as the artist. Sometimes, though, it’s only meaningful to the artist.
White opens the door to understanding, but it’s up to readers to grasp the fact that there may not really be any meaning. That’s the point.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1620400944
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
PROFILES
Ultimately, readers attuned to Weschler's esoteric subject matter and obscure cultural references will no doubt enjoy this...
Weschler's collection of eclectic essays, which reference Eastern European history, Vermeer, Einstein and Ground Zero, among other topics, will alternately enlighten, entertain, confound and confuse.
At least the author, a longtime writer at the New Yorker, isn't above admitting that his perceived “convergences”—oddly diverse photos, paintings or historical happenstances that he feels bound to connect—are often tenuous at best. His own daughter, he points out, would often explain them by saying simply: “Daddy's having another one of his loose-synapsed moments.” We know just what she means when Weschler (Vermeer in Bosnia, 2004) tries to pair a photo of two Ground Zero firemen with Grant Wood's classic painting, American Gothic, or when he earnestly contends that the photographer who shot that famous 1967 photo of Che Guevara's bullet-riddled corpse was somehow thinking of Rembrandt's 1632 painting, The Anatomy Lesson. A photo of the 1986 Challenger explosion leads Weschler to a shot of a nuclear A-bomb test. The visage of Newt Gingrich looks to the author like the spitting image of Slobodan Milosevic, which leads to a strained comparison of their biographies and political DNA. The nascent, struggling democracies of Eastern Europe, on which the author spends much time, recall Oliver Sacks’s 1973 bestseller, Awakenings, which described his treatment of neurologically damaged patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. While much of this feels like wild overreaching, other Weschler flights of intellectual fancy are curiously entertaining and compelling. An essay on “The Graphics of Solidarity” traces the passionate poster art secretly created by intrepid graphic artists during the early-1980s struggle between Polish shipyard workers and their Soviet puppet government. An eerie full-page ad, featured prominently in many magazines the week before 9/11, shows a Lufthansa jet streaking narrowly between several skyscrapers. The author even makes a persuasive case for the influence of deep-space photos and lunar landscapes on the art work of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Ultimately, readers attuned to Weschler's esoteric subject matter and obscure cultural references will no doubt enjoy this odd collection of delicacies. To others, the exercise may smack suspiciously of dilettantism.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-932416-34-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
About as exciting as you could expect a story of low-end online art fraud to be.
The true story of the man who perpetuated the first great eBay scam—or, at least, the first to get much press.
During the late 1990s, this Sacramento lawyer was pretty desperate for something to relieve the day-job tedium when Ken Fetterman, an old Marine buddy, came back into his life. A constant irritant, Fetterman had one saving grace in Walton’s eyes: He had been buying art cheap and making a profit selling it on eBay, and he was willing to show Walton how to do it. It doesn’t sound that much more thrilling than lawyering, but Walton’s eBay career apparently satisfied something in his muffled, white-collar existence. He started to spend weekends trolling estate sales and junk shops for ignored artworks that could make a moderate profit online. It helped if the paintings, almost always the work of anonymous amateurs, resembled those of better-known artists, giving Fetterman a reason to fake a signature on the canvas. Although they never out-and-out claimed that the paintings were produced by certain artists, Fetterman and Walton did everything they could to stoke buyers’ beliefs along those lines; they also used fake eBay identities to artificially inflate the bidding prices during auctions. Eventually, Walton got so good at the swindling game that he quit the law firm and started faking full-time. That’s when the FBI stepped in, looking to make an example of this outlaw of the Internet Wild West. Walton displays a refreshing lack of self-pity and even seems to admire many of the reporters hounding him for the front-page story his case became. If the dénouement is less than thrilling, it’s at least honest.
About as exciting as you could expect a story of low-end online art fraud to be.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-0711-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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