Cattelan Conglomeration

Friends took me to the Maurizio Cattelan show at the Guggenheim the day before it closed; here are some photos in case you missed it.  Roberta Smith panned the show and artist in her review A Suspension of Willful Disbelief:

The effect is initially startling, but ultimately disrespectful and perverse ... the show suggests that Mr. Cattelan knows what he’s about: he’s always been uneven and now he is running out of ideas.


Still, the show was a crowd-pleaser, stringing up the artist's "lifetime" output -- pieces normally shown isolated in plenty of space -- like ornaments on a Christmas tree.  Whatever its merit as retrospective, it was interesting to see how sculpture normally planted on the ground looks floating in space, from above and below.

Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian

Did she know before she arrived that her hair would match?
A friend read a review -- I assume A Spectacle With a Message, Roberta Smith, NYT -- and requested a report.

The show does feel like a spectacle -- the huge, unpolished vitrines could just as well hold the remains of a crashed alien armada.  And a few things look like they came from space, like the hanging garden of ghostly sunflowers (below right) Smith calls "mysterious creature-plants."


Above left, a leaden barn full of leftover Nazi salutes.  Above right, the giant ghost flowers probe cracked earth.

In spite of the scale of the show and the huge amount of calculation and manufacturing that had to go into it -- not to mention the eight or so guards who add a slight Fort Knox feel -- it doesn't feel overblown, and some of the pieces still have the raw energy Kiefer seems to shoot for.  The show, at Gagosian's 24th St. outpost, closes this Saturday.


Above left, a nice ad hoc roof on a twig mountain at the bottom.  Above right, an exploding glass shard wedding dress, raw as student work.

Like an unheated, slightly creepy museum

Flag Foundation View 2

More from the Flag Art Foundation on 25th St. in Chelsea.  Above, looking straight down from the ninth floor patio.  Below left, the magnificent Starrett-Lehigh Building to the west.


Above right, the top of the huge Post Office facility on 11th Ave., with New Jersey across the Hudson.  And below, a woman stops a respectful distance away from the sun-blasted ghost tree on the patio.

Buckle Up

I don't wear a belt or get the urge to decorate myself, but I do get the urge to copy all the pictures at the Buckle Shop to Flickr so they're preserved for eternity.

The Jolly Roger buckle above looks more sturdy than the Dreamland Perfume skulls below left, and are about $100 million cheaper than Damien Hirst's bauble below right.  At $15 a buckle, you could make a near bullet proof vest for less than $500.  Imagine the sweet feeling you'd get the first time your army of skulls caught a bullet in its teeth.


And though the shop sells a nice, heroic Painter buckle, I prefer the sexy one below.


Update: I just noticed C-Monster is talking affordable skulls today too.  Is something is in the air, besides all that crap from cars & trucks?