“Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise - all are now the norm, often edging out much else.”
“Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.”
“One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window, women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs, so do prospects for women.”
“When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.”
“Biennial culture is already almost irrelevant, because so many more people are providing so many better opportunities for artists to exhibit their work.”
“Galleries began growing in both number and size in the late seventies, when artists who worked in lofts wanted to exhibit their work in spaces similar to the ones the art was made in.”
“If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.”
“It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.”
“Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.”
“My culture-deprived, aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.”