Speaking Out Against Commercial Photography as Art

Photographer Jill Greenberg’s show “Glass Ceiling” at Clamp Art presents outtakes from one of her commercial editorials and plays them off as feminist art, but are they? READ MORE.

Cheryl Means Camp, Bling, Parties & Garfield Tattoos

This is the last weekend to visit performance art/party collective Cheryl’s show on Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, where they have set up shop in the Rawson Projects. This quirky group of artists with an obvious affection for glitter, masks and videos are silkscreening tshirts and totes and selling the artifacts from their parties over the years…. READ MORE.

How Comfortable Are You in the City, Really?

Can anyone ever be truly comfortable in New York? I’ve lived here my whole life and still feel the daily stresses of subway rides, traffic, overcrowding and of course insanely high prices (tickets to MoMA cost $25 now?). These Manhattan blues are part of the reason I was both intrigued and skeptical of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a pop-up event space in the East Village that will present a series of lectures, film screenings and interactive programs all based around the idea of confronting comfort in our cities and urban development. With corporate sponsoring shoved right into its very title, I wondered if the Lab would stick to a privileged, glossy view of urbanization or actually offer legitimate “solutions for city life,” as the program’s website states. Even the word “comfort” suggested to me that these solutions would be targeted only towards a particular social class who has the resources to take advantage of them…. READ MORE.

Is the Color Gray Doomed?

On August 6, The Painting Center closed its summer show devoted to gray, Grey Matter. I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise that the show wasn’t widely reviewed as a summer blockbuster. It didn’t have nearly enough color for that…. READ MORE.

Fear and Loathing at :)

Drawn by an over-900 people attending Facebook events page and a plug on GAYLETTER two months ago, I wandered into the opening of :) by FriendsWithYou at The Hole and left feeling a mixture of what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson described as “fear and loathing.” Now, a few days before the exhibition’s closing, I revisited :) to see if my opinion of the art would change without the unseasonable near 100 degree heat, crowded gallery and drunkenness. It didn’t…. READ MORE.

Courtney Love’s Hole Inspires Art Show

With the exhibition Pretty on the Inside, co-curators KAWS and Erik Parker reveal that they must be fans of the Courtney Love-led band Hole’s debut album and song for which it is named, but they also make us wonder about the show’s connection to the music…. READ MORE.

Art Blog Art Blog Art Space

Williamsburg artist Joshua Abelow makes some pretty cool work. When he’s not in the studio he’s working on his website Art Blog Art Blog. Most of us now spend a great deal of our lives online, so its no surprise that the artistic process has begun to bleed over from the studio into the web…. READ MORE.

Summer Guests in Bushwick

The mercury in your thermometer can easily climb to 100+ degrees during these dog days of summer in north Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The concrete streets are helplessly desolate and even the Bushwick pigeons seem to have given up. Bushwick has been quieter lately, and the local art scene might have been hiding in the close proximity of blasting air conditioners most of the time, but even with all these factor you can definitively say that it certainly is not dead. In fact, several prominent Bushwick galleries and art spaces opted out of the summer break and have been serving up refreshing art options…. READ MORE.