PIXMAVEN - The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator

Feeling inarticulate? Critically gauche? Or just verbally impotent? We here at Pixmaven have developed The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator so you need never again feel at a loss for pithy commentary or savvy “insights.”

Fall Art Season 2012: Pre-Renaissance at the Getty, Warhol at the Met, Picasso at the Guggenheim - WSJ.com

Art Under Assault

‘Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962’|
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Oct. 6-Jan. 14

The premise of a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is deceptively simple: The show surveys nearly 100 canvases that have been assaulted, creatively, by their makers—either by scarring, ripping, cutting or burning—during the unsettling years after World War II.

The museum says that by upending the traditional idea of the canvas as a window-pane-like portal into a faraway world, these artists collectively transformed painting into sculpture—a mixed-media move that artists have been grappling with ever since.

That sounds good.

International Art English - Triple Canopy

IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes … experiencability.

Space is an especially important word in IAE and can refer to a raft of entities not traditionally thought of as spatial (the space of humanity) as well as ones that are in most circumstances quite obviously spatial (the space of the gallery). An announcement for the 2010 exhibition “Jimmie Durham and His

Metonymic Banquet,” at Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo Murcia in Spain, had the artist “questioning the division between inside and outside in the Western sacred space”—the venue was a former church—“to highlight what is excluded in order to invest the sanctum with its spatial purity. Pieces of cement, wire, refrigerators, barrels, bits of glass and residues of ‘the sacred,’ speak of the space of the exhibition hall … transforming it into a kind of ‘temple of confusion.’”

Spatial and nonspatial space are interchangeable in IAE. The critic John Kelsey, for instance, writes that artist Rachel Harrison “causes an immediate confusion between the space of retail and the space of subjective construction.” The rules for space in this regard also apply to field, as in “the field of the real”—which is where, according to art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “the parafictional has one foot.” (Prefixes like para-, proto-, post-, and hyper- expand the lexicon exponentially and Germanly, which is to say without adding any new words.) It’s not just that IAE is rife with spacey terms like intersection, parallel, parallelism, void, enfold, involution, and platform. IAE’s literary conventions actually favor the hard-to-picture spatial metaphor: A practice “spans” from drawing all the way to artist’s books; Matthew Ritchie’s works, in the words of Artforum, “elegantly bridge a rift in the art-science continuum”; Saâdane Afif “will unfold his ideas beyond the specific and anecdotal limits of his Paris experience to encompass a more general scope, a new and broader dimension of meaning.”