One meets the most interesting people in the obituary pages of The New York Times. On Monday, July 13, 2015, for those of us who didn’t know him before by reputation or his 20 books, we learned about Charles Winick, a professor of anthropology and sociology. He taught at the Graduate Center of the City […]

For four days at the end of June the art gallery, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, on the occasion of the closure of its space so that its old one-story industrial building could be torn down for another condo, rented 12 horses from a nearby stable and brought them into the gallery to spend the day and […]

            With the start of summer travel, I thought is was time to write an appreciation of the Bavarian island medieval town of Lindau, located on the eastern shore of Lake Constance (the Bodensee).  Lindau is close to the borders of Austria and Switzerland and can be reached by a short […]

To my surprise and delight, I like the new Whitney. And that is the consensus of the cities’ major critics. From the outside, all agree that the building is hard to take in. It looks as if a beginner at Legos piled up a variety of horizontal units and they somehow balanced. The eastern and […]

A Tale of Two Artists’s Careers Keith Haring (1958-1990) and Jeff Koons (1955-) were born in Pennsylvania and grew up in middle-class families. Their careers as artists took off in the 1980s, at a time when contemporary art was just beginning to be looked at seriously. It was an exciting moment. The late Marcia Tucker […]

  How do we access Beth Lipman’s phantasmagoric sculpture, Laid (Time-) Table with Cycads, with its profusion of familiar material objects and organic matter all made of clear, sparkling, crystal-like glass? We recognize immediately its alignment with the tradition of still lifes. But, look again, and notice that most of the perfectly crafted pieces are […]

Kunsthaus Bergenz, a place for contemporary art       Exhibiting contemporary art has not been a simple enterprise since about or before the 80s when the possibilities of what could be art became anything. We wait in anticipation to see if the new 422 million dollar version of the downtown Whitney will succeed in […]

      As reported in “The Spy Who Fired Me, The human costs of workplace monitoring” by Esther Kaplan, in March 2015, Harper’s, the company Cornerstone OnDemand provides software that tracks the every move of a company’s employees. Companies that use its platform can quickly assess an employee’s performance by analyzing his or her […]

          Sometime in the fall, some one or some others decorated a tree on the campus of Pratt Institute. The only sign of identification is a white piece of marble-like stone propped up on legs of wood with the words “Celebration of Life” etched in script. The dressing of patches of […]

One of the many surprises at the recent extraordinary exhibition, Goya: Order & Disorder, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were his still-life paintings. They are remarkable for their departure from traditional still lifes of memento mori sentiments that usually include only a trace of the reminder of death. In Goya’s still lifes, […]

  One cannot ignore or underestimate the emotional depth associated with traditional Confucian values in China, specifically in relation to the social environment and parental feelings imposed on a single daughter. Any attempt by her to break away from the conservative expectations of the traditional family unit often results in conflict. The artist Lu Zhang […]