Nothing says instant cinematic classic like a climactic moment involving shitting on a bus. Or is that an instant trash classic? Either way, Netflix’s The Perfection blasted its way into my heart like an explosive bowel movement, with the alternately shrieking and whimpering dialogue: “If I move, I’ll shit! I’m going to shit on the … Continue reading
Monthly Archives: May 2019
I’ve Seen That Face Before: Meet Chris Jones, Grace Jones’s Talented Brother
You know all the words to Grace Jones’s Pull Up To the Bumper and you’ve probably strutted in the club to Walking In the Rain. But have you met her brother Chris Jones? Iconic in his own right, he is a musician and DJ making waves with his new eminently danceable album Strong2. We talk … Continue reading
If Con Art Is Art, Then Donald Trump Is The Master: Andres Serrano’s “The Game: All Things Trump”
I live with Trumpy Bear. Yes, the “I come when the Trumpet sounds. I am the Storm!” Trumpy Bear with a comb-over, a tragic tie, and an enormous American flag built into his back. The one from the commercials airing on Fox News that seem like an SNL skit (what doesn’t anymore?). My relationship with … Continue reading
Filthy Dreams GIF Review: Gina Beavers’s “The Life I Deserve”
I hated Gina Beavers’s paintings the first time I saw them in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York in 2015. Detested. I was revolted and repulsed by their thickened physicality. Completely turned-off. I wanted to rip her depictions of rippled abs and bloody meat right off the wall. However, I have certainly come around in the … Continue reading
Money Can’t Buy You Camp: Why I Love That The Met’s Camp Gala Was A Failure
If Charles Ludlam thought Susan Sontag did a number on camp, I can’t imagine what he would have thought witnessing the camp tragedy that occurred on the pink carpet (pink being, apparently, the color of camp) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday. Whew! Mary! It was a camp catastrophe, a camp calamity, a … Continue reading
Collapsed Distance: Barbara Ess Observes and Surveils at Magenta Plains
American art critic Kristine McKenna, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1991, referred to artist Barbara Ess’s signature pinhole photographs as “luxuriously beautiful.” Those photographs, in which subjects are blurred, information is blacked out and realities blend into fantasies, expose photography as a medium that, at its best, is rife for the subjectivity of … Continue reading