Watching Fulll Firearms, a 2011 feature film by London-based artist Emily Wardill, I thought of a quote by French philosopher Jacques Derrida: “As marginal people excluded from the process of production and circulation, the poor come to represent the gods or the dead. They occupy the place of the dead man or the spirit, the [...]
Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective | until May 28 | SFMOMA | San Francisco As famed art critic Boris Groys persuasively argues in his book Art Power, the museum nowadays is a place “where we can learn to resist the dictatorship of contemporary taste.” That is, the museum offers us something that counters the image of [...]
With its new exhibition, The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860-1900, the Legion of Honor gives San Francisco viewers a primer on a 19th-century art movement that was fascinating in many aspects. In hellish Victorian London, where in 1884 cultural critic John Ruskin talked of a polluted “plague-cloud” and a “fatal infection of the sky,” a [...]
The Creators Project, a global arts and technology initiative founded by Vice and Intel, will be taking their show on the road this month to San Francisco’s Fort Mason. The weekend of March 17th and 18th will mark the first ever time the Creators Project has held an event on the U.S. West Coast. The [...]
State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 | February 29 to June 17, 2012 | Berkeley Art Museum | Berkeley Since October 2011, a large number of art institutions in Southern California have been overtaken by Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented, Getty Foundation-financed orgy of exhibitions and events dedicated to postwar Californian art (1945-1980). [...]
The Forgotten Space by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, San Francisco Art Institute, January 25, 7:30pm. If you don’t believe that a film about the shipping industry can be interesting and engaging, think again. The Forgotten Space, based on Sekula’s long-term photographic project, Fish Story, is a timely exploration of the effects of globalization and [...]
HUMBLE POP ARTISTS AT THE BERKELEY ART MUSEUM One of the foremost innovations of 20th-century visual culture was that art started to look humble. Seeing Kurt Schwitters’ fragile little collages, made out of various scraps and trash, at the Berkeley museum a few months ago was like an invigorating slap in the face. Schwitters worked [...]
On Saturday, December 10, the SOMArts cultural center organized its third performance festival, where almost 100 artists presented two-minute works in a square hole in the main gallery. Truth be told, I did not manage to see all the pieces. But from what I saw, there were enough intelligent performances for the event to be [...]
The Left Coast Leaning performing arts festival, organized by the YBCA in conjunction with Youth Speaks’ Living Word Project, kind of oscillated between the two poles of pure visual enjoyment and entertainment, and perplexing uncomfortableness. On the one hand there was the dazzling spectacle of virtuosic tap dancing by Jason Samuels Smith, on the other [...]
Beat by the Bay, San Francisco Visual Artists of the Fifties and Their Galleries, Ever Gold, December 8, 2011 – January 6, 2012 Everybody’s heard of the literary works produced by the great writers of the Beat generation, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But that legendary countercultural movement also included visual artists, who without [...]
Thursday, April 12, 2012
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