Gayle Rodda Kurtz

About sex, again . . .

July 18, 2015 by William Eaton

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 University of New York and is known for his warnings about the blurring of lines between the sexes in The New People: Desexualization in American […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: Charles Winick, girls, Lena Dunham, Manohla Dargis, Mario Vargas Llosa, sex, sexuality

The Art of Horses

July 4, 2015 by William Eaton

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 eat their fill. The horses were equally spaced around the gallery and tethered to rings on the wall. Only seven people were admitted at a […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Horses in Art, Jannis Kounellis

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The Treasures of Lindau

June 20, 2015 by William Eaton

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 train ride from Munich or Zurich for a day’s visit or a longer stay. During good weather there is no better place for a bike […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: Julius von Bismarck, Lindau, Lindauer Marionettenoper

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Outdoor Celebration at the Whitney

June 6, 2015 by William Eaton

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 western facades are opposites—closed on the west and wide open on the east—for reasons the architect, Renzo Piano, described in The New Yorker, On the […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, New York City, Renzo Piano, The Whitney Museum of American Art

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Haring and Koons–At a Crossroad

May 23, 2015 by William Eaton

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 was fired when, as a curator at the Whitney, she exhibited Minimalist artists like Richard Tuttle. One of his works consisted of a few inches […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, New York City

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detail from Beth Lipman's "Laid (Time-) Table with Cycads," 2015. Glass, wood, adhesive and paint. 92 x 192 x 57 inches.

Beth Lipman, Artist of Glass

May 9, 2015 by William Eaton

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 broken and spilling over the sides of a long, traditional-looking wooden table painted a stark white. Unlike paintings of still lifes, this conglomeration of objects […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Beth Lipman, Still Life

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Kunsthaus Bregenz

April 25, 2015 by William Eaton

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 its new location at the foot of the High Line. (So far the reviews are positive.) Will the trendy meatpacking district with Hudson River view be […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Rosemarie Trockel, Trix and Robert Haussmann

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We are the robots!

April 11, 2015 by William Eaton

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 online interactions, including emails, instant messages and Web use. . . With the rise of the global workforce, the remote workforce, the smartphone and the […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, global capitalism, technology

A Tree in Brooklyn–Dressed for Winter

March 21, 2015 by William Eaton

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 yarn around the tree trunk stretches up to the three major branches. Like Joseph’s coat of many colors, the fragments are of many colored threads […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz • Tags: art, Pratt Institute