The pandemic is ongoing and confusion persists—and I’m not talking about the Omicron variant. You can’t discuss art in 2021 without mentioning N.F.T.s. Non-fungible tokens stormed the gates of the contemporary-art establishment in March, when Beeple, the nom de keyboard of the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, sold a crypto-art work at Christie’s for more than sixty-nine million dollars. As to the calibre of Beeple’s art, based on my admittedly cursory viewing, I’d say that it’s aptly described in his Instagram bio as…Read More
In the early nineteen-seventies, a group of American artists who shared an unironic love of craft, vivid color, and kitsch—rebels against the ornamentation-averse restraint of the Minimalists—became known as the Pattern and Decoration movement (a.k.a. P&D). By the mid-eighties, the initial enthusiasm, mostly in Europe, for the group’s paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and textiles had waned. Individual artists succeeded, but P&D was written off as a footnote that was slightly embarrassing. (And also threatening: it’s no coincidence that the group’s focus…Read More
“Making Art with Failed Banks” By Mark Singer in the September 26, 2016 Issue Michael Mandiberg, an artist whose preoccupations merge digital information with visual representation, has a lot going on. This was also the case eight years ago, when he lived in Brooklyn (Prospect Heights, still does) and was a senior fellow at Eyebeam, a nonprofit that supports artists immersed in technology and playful technologists. “I was noticing that people were giving away books, streeting them, leaving them on…Read More
Read in The New Yorker. Printed in the October 5, 2015 Issue. ERIN O’KEEFE September 9, 2015 – October 10, 2015 Photographs of geometric arrangements of painted boards and tinted Plexiglas will inevitably draw comparisons to Barbara Kasten’s influential oeuvre. O’Keefe, a New York artist and architect, nods to Kasten (and to Eileen Quinlan and Sara VanDerBeek) but stakes her own claim to the territory—call it Bauhaus playhouse—in a series of seductively simple color images. Using reflected light and overlapping colors,…Read More
