Culture Pundits

Chaperone, via EFA Describing the contemporary media environment as 'viral' does only partial justice. Yes, pieces are passed person to person via friends and acquaintances in a way that is similar to the spread of a virus...

The End of Oil via exitart.org To a greater and greater extent, it seems, the world we inherit has been organized around the patterns of consumption and production of oil...

Disciplinary Chart by Andrea Liu Everyone has had the experience of discussing an artist or an event or something with someone who you hold in very high regard, only to learn that they have never, ever heard of said person, place or thing...

Karen Finley, of the Four, via artinterviews.com Though the NEA Four won the legal battle surrounding the veto of their grants, its difficult to count the organization itself as anything other than a casualty of the culture war...

Johanna Billing, still from Where she is at, 2001, via raster.art.pl Upon witnessing the return of his father's ghost, Hamlet mutters: "And still your fingers on your lips, I pray/The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite/That ever I was born to set it right!" Its an image - of a dislocated,...

Jonathan Brand, Fallen, medium density fiberboard, wood glue, hardwood dowels, 2007 via jonathanbrand.com At NURTUREart’s exhibition for the Bushwick Biennial, the intent is to focus on “utopia, urban change, and the role of a place in artistic identity” but the resulting show is dreamier...

Molly Larkey Untitled ("Pastel Bars"), acrylic and gouache on paper via pocket utopia This Saturday marks the opening of the inaugural Bushwick Biennial...

ArtWalk 09 Continuing what has to be a banner week for Brooklyn art events - look for our upcoming coverage of the Bushwick Biennial - the Brooklyn ArtWalk kicks off on Saturday...

Its Bushwick This weekend marks the beginning of this year's installment of the Bushwick Open Studios. Sponsored by Arts In Bushwick, BOS '09 features over 200 registered artists, and aims to involve the entire local community in organizing, celebrating and otherwise facilitating the event...

Gran Fury, 1988, oil on canvas, 8 × 10 feet. Courtesy of Visual AIDS. The efficacy of political art is too often measured against more classically political actions. Thus activist artists are asked, somehow, to justify their work on the same terms as organizers and other social agitators...

Ethan Zuckerman via contributemedia.com Technology usually plays a central role in narratives of progress. Broadly understood as sedimented human ingenuity, different stories grant technology a greater or lesser role in our eventual emancipation...

Liao Yibai, Cash Fighting 2009, Stainless steel, 161 lbs, via mikeweissgallery.com The figurative rendering of a cultural imaginary is not new terrain. A good deal of work consists simply in recording the exaggerations and misreadings ostensibly structuring our collective unconscious...

Lee Mingwei via malepregnancy.com "I would like," wrote Michel de Certeau, "to follow out a few of these multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices,...

Carsten Nicolai, labor e, 1997, steel, rubber, wave-form generators, mixing board, dat recorder. Via the artist's website. Collaboration in the visual arts today is not without its contested legacy...

Museum of Arts and Design Thursday, a panel moderated by Marek Bartelik and Barbara A. MacAdam, will consider the relationship between the national frame and art criticism...

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg. Throw (2004). Video Still. Image courtesy of the artists...

Matt Sheridan Smith, Untitled (open/shut), 2008, looped video projection (7:35 mins) via lisa cooley Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos, Matt Sheridan Smith’s debut solo exhibition at Lisa Cooley, is comprised of opaque sculptures and drawings which occupy a vague, transitional territory despite...

A form in decline, the print magazine remains a pernicious breed. Contemporary fame is largely its doing; the fawning, uncritical portraiture, the endless parade of high gloss mediocrity...

Cobain and co, via stereogum For a decade that is almost another full decade behind us, the nineties remain mercifully undefined...

Lionel Trilling, in the course of arguing that the focus of personal morality had shifted from a Victorian era emphasis on outward consistency, or sincerity to a proto-existential adjunct to 'be true to oneself,' known as authenticity, quotes Andre Gide's remark that, "One cannot both be sincere...

Thar Sayegh, unidentified work. Freedom and Beauty: The Art of Iraqi Refugees St. Paul the Apostle - 405 W 59th St, New York NY 30 April - 28 May 2009 Everyone's talking about faith these days...

Michael Paul Britto, HomeBase III, Room 09, 2008 mixed-media installation Via HomeBase Project Too frequently the conversation surrounding gentrification amounts to a frustrating mix of polemics and general confusion. Rarely has an issue been opposed by more people less effectively...

Piotr Kamler, Chronopolis via www.attitudes.ch We often imagine the arrival of cinema as a clean break with the traditions of popular, live performance; as though (popular) film arrived as the ham-fisted alienation it is today...

"@indyartgirl Very innovative online advertising from the @thepulitzer! http://is.gd/b1ZB Via @culturepundits." With a new Twitter-powered campaign promoting its Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at ...

"@indyartgirl Very innovative online advertising from the @thepulitzer! http://is.gd/b1ZB Via @culturepundits." With a new Twitter-powered campaign promoting its Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at ...

Michelle Lopez Michelle Lopez - The Violent Bear It Away 21 March - 17 May 2009 at Simon Preston Gallery 301 Broome Street A conversation with artists Michelle Lopez and Andrew Cornell Robinson that took place in both of the artists’ studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn on 7 April 2009...

Guy Ben-Ner, Stills from Stealing Beauty, 2007 Single channel video DVD, via Postmasters Gallery Are spaces and places of consumption actually laden with significance? Or are they simply the last shared experience we have left to talk about...

Argument via eflux Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall's 1978 film essay Argument, is many things; a deconstruction of print advertising, a critique of the dominant construction of masculinity, and a flabby, navel-gazing manifesto of frustrated ambitions, to name but a few...

Ryan Trecartin composite image from Sibling Topics, 2009 Single-channel video installation. Sets and installation in collaboration with Lizzie Fitch...

Julieta Aranda I Have Lost Confidence, 2005 via www.edwardmitterrand.com This Wednesday, the Guggenheim launches its Intervals series with a conversation with Julieta Aranda, whose multi-part installation 'activates the museum's triangular staircase.' Included is an oversize clock that the...

Mark Leckey, Made in 'Eaven, 2004, still image from 16mm film in color, duration unknown. Via Gavin Brown. On Rhizome today, Brian Droitcour publishes a brief survey of last weekend's Migrating Forms at the Anthology Film Archives, the successor to the retired New York Underground Film Festival...