The Neighbors

The collaborative floor at the New Museum struck me as proof that most people, most of the time, are boring. I’m not proud of that. I wasn’t happy about it. You give people an empty room, and they write the most annoyingly obvious things about corporations or money or they paint Mickey Mouse or the […]

Magritte

Magritte made me think about vocabulary. Magritte works in trunks (the human kind), tubes, clouds, wood, ball bearings, music, chess pieces, rocks. Blues and browns and blacks and greys. I work in animals, stained glass, shoulders and brown hair, houses, and glasses (the kind you drink out of). I work in fairy tales and Bible […]

Balthus

“If it’s creepy-dirty, that’s Balthus,” a friend said to me once. Balthus didn’t like bios, thought people didn’t need to know anything about him, that his work should speak for itself. It should. It does. So I wasted no time learning about him before I went to see his show at the Met. He also […]

Burden

The first time I visited the New Museum, there was a human figure writhing on the floor, and I never was sure if it was a living human or a very well-made automaton. And I ate an excellent red velvet cupcake. So I was sold. This time, Chris Burden’s show offered a line to wait […]