Dearest fellow obsessives and maybe stalkers, I want to personally invite you, dearest Filthy Dreams compulsives, to come together to celebrate our collective fixations–our role models or filth elders, if you will, at Idol Worship, a group exhibition curated by your faithful Filthy Dreams co-founder that opens at Smack Mellon on November 16 from 6-8PM (and … Continue reading
The politics of liberation are essentially corporeal. The struggle for free will—for subjecthood—is defined by the ease and unease of the body. The fear of hunger is physical; the wretched horror of deprivation is one of bodily need. All emotional despair is felt as corporeal absence or excess. If I am so wretchedly miserable that … Continue reading
Isn’t there something just so immediately hilarious about bestowing a gift nobody wants only to unveil it as even more hideous than anticipated? Ta da! This week, Jeff Koons perfected this show-and-tell act with the inauguration of his monumental and massively ugly Bouquet of Tulips in Paris as a memorial to the victims of the … Continue reading
Curating isn’t an easy job. At its best, the act of curation is its own form of artistic creation–a kind of creative essaying. The curator has a thesis derived either from his/her own observations about the world or filtered through a particular cultural criticism that is then supported through the arrangement of art objects. There … Continue reading
Near the beginning of A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan’s newly restored 1974 semi-fictionalized film about British artist David Hockney, the artist’s studio assistant Mo McDermott says in a voiceover, “When love goes wrong, more than two people are affected.” When it comes to Hockney, he’s right. Hazan gives us an intimate look into how forcefully … Continue reading
If you run a Google search for “Stonewall exhibition,” you will find dozens upon dozens of arts and historical venues across the United States that put together shows related (with varying degrees of specificity) to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. In Philadelphia, Stonewall is being commemorated at Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery, in a show of … Continue reading
In her 1994 essay The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, art historian Linda Nochlin ties the genesis of modernism to the French Revolution, framing the guillotine as a symbol of the severing of inherited dynastic power ushering in an era of radical politics, creativity, and culture. The guillotine becomes representative … Continue reading
