Ben Davis
1.When I walked into “Gazing Ball,” Jeff Koons’s new show at David Zwirner, my first reaction was… pleasant surprise.The show, advertised as the opening shot in a Year of Koons leading up to his Whitney retrospective in 2014, consists of a number of...
What to make of Gutai? The Guggenheim’s survey of the mid-century Japanese avant-garde group, which closes today, is dazzling but also perplexing. There are iconic works like Tanaka Atsuko’s famous fashion-sculpture-technology hybrid “...
Molly Crabapple is a star, though not an art star in the conventional sense — and I mean that as a compliment. “Shell Game,” her recent show featuring nine large, fanciful paintings, closed last week at the LES’s small Smart Clothes gallery,...
With over 50 paintings, “museum-quality” is probably the term you'd use to describe Gagosian’s Jean-Michel Basquiat show, which has been drawing rock-star crowds to West 24th street since it opened. But really, it might be better to...
There are only a few great critics holding forth in today’s waning critical climate who maintain an element of danger in their invocations. These voices of authority and interrogation bend and veer away from our understood rails of art appreciation into...
Imagine yourself cracking open one of those terrible essays about “how young people talk today.” The author makes a big deal about how the kids are tossing around slangy abbreviations like “LOL” and “OMG.” But you are baffled to discover that in explaining...
Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors,” just about to end an extended run at Luhring Augustine, is a great work. It is so great, as a matter of fact, that I almost immediately want to develop a critique of it, because it makes such a convincing case for its...
After more than 75 years in the shadow of its glamorous cousin, San Francisco's "other" bridge is getting a chance to shine. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has been turned into the latest — and by far the biggest — backdrop for...
The Guggenheim's newly opened “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia” is a rapaciously forward-thinking show — it represents “a new curatorial model” (according to the museum's deputy director Nancy Spector) and “proposes a...
THE ART LOVER is an infrequent column of love advice from an art critic's perspective, written by executive editor Ben Davis. If you have a question about art and love that you would like answered, write bdavis[at]artinfo.com with “The Art Lover” in...
