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In the first ten days of Performa 09, I attended 20 events. I rued the jam-packed schedule, got at least one venue and time completely wrong, and drifted off during Tacita Dean's languid 100-minute film of Merce Cunningham's dance company. I witnessed Ylva Ogland trying to distill vodka and ground rubies alchemically; was transported as Ruth Sacks channeled the legendary Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, in a brief outdoor concert at Castle Clinton; happily followed Guy Ben-Ner's daffy film about... read more...

When it was announced back in October that the New Museum would showcase billionaire mega-collector Dakis Joannou's collection of contemporary art--which includes Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Terence Koh, and Urs Fischer--and that it would be curated by Koons (who has 40 works in the collection), the art world cringed at the insiderness of it all. Bloggers, particularly Modern Art Notes's Tyler Green, harped on its ethics.
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Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. It's set expectations for his full-building retrospective at the New Museum incredibly high, and he's working hard to meet them. Fischer has lowered ceilings, added lights, and c... read more...

Ai Weiwei suffers a brain haemorrhage; Hans Ulrich Obrist is named the most powerful person in the art world; Dasha Zhukova's Garage presents first Rothko show in Moscow; Miroslaw Balka's new installation at the Turbine Hall opens in London; The Outset Fund acquires new works at Frieze for the Tate Collection; and Obama unveils what he's looking at on his walls. ... read more...

The demise of the art world has been greatly exaggerated, including by me. It's as if a bunch of spotlights went out when the market crashed last October, and now, as they flicker back on, we're able to see new green shoots busting out of the establishment's cracks. The plug was pulled, but life went on--invigorating life. There might not be a new movement, per se, but there are radically adjusted mind-sets. Fear of form, color, and physicality are diminishing. Previously forbidden methodologies... read more...

This week we got our first look at the Obamas' White House art, and it contained a few surprises. The 45 works the First Family chose to display, borrowed from various government institutions, range from simmering meditations on geometry and color by the great and under-­appreciated Josef Albers to depictions of Native Americans by the ever-mysterious George Catlin to a glowing abstract Zen TV screen by Mark Rothko to otherworldly still lifes by the minor modern master Giorgio Morandi. ... read more...

One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window, women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs, so do prospects for women. Given this season's abundance of female gallery shows (36 percent, up from 17 percent in 2005), I'll go with the former. Seven of the most exciting are pictured here, and one of them, Roni Horn, is deservedly having her first full-scale museum show.... read more...

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings. Twenty-three years later, many continue to dismiss her as a prissy painter of pretty pictures--or, I should say, pretty genitalia. Even when hailed for being "the most famous and highly paid woman artist in America," she gets saddled with a qualifier.

Last week, Fox News' harebrained commentator Glenn Beck took up the role of extreme right-wing art critic. He did a batty eight-minute paranoid rant tying together Obama, communism, NBC, the Soviet Union, Mussolini, Standard Oil, syphilis, fascism, the U.N., architecture, and public art in New York. New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz challenges him to put his taste where his mouth is.
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The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back. Even the stately Met has cut staff; no one knows if the Whitney is going ahead with its new downtown building; it's anyone's guess when Dia will finally open a permanent space in the city. Yet the fall season of shows in New York's galleries, museums, and alternative spaces should quell some of the skittishness and titillate our senses. ... read more...

There were tossed tomatoes aplenty, although the one that smashed me in the shoulder within minutes of the event's commencement I never saw coming. As I wiped off the runny residue, togas and robes fluttered, dancers dressed as Roman vixens writhed on floating platforms, Black Sabbath's "War Pig" blasted over loudspeakers, passenger jets roared overhead, and spectators jeered and cheered as leaky boats made of what looked like reeds and junk foundered in shallow water, rammed one another, and fi... read more...

The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor. This avant-garde painter's decisive moment came in a salon show in Brussels in 1887 (the same year the gods had Van Gogh meet Gauguin). Ensor was a co-founder of a group called "the Twenty," living with his mother at 27, and doing all right in his native Belgium. That year, he exhibited a breakthrough series of large, smoky drawings of Christ in modern-day settings. As fate had it, they were installed near Georges Seurat's epic, world-cha... read more...

This week at No Soul for Sale, a makeshift four-day art fair, I caught an enticing, exciting glimpse of one of the ways the near future may look. The intrepid X-initiative, housed for the next nine months in the former Dia building on West 22nd Street, is staging what it calls an exercise in "radical hospitality," inviting more than 30 respected not-for-profit centers, alternative institutions, artist collectives, and independent enterprises from New York, the U.S., and around the world to exhib... read more...

Last week I met with MoMA's Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Ann Temkin. We talked about the two-week discussion (that took place on my Facebook Page) about the lack of representation of women artists on the fourth and fifth floors of the museum's permanent collection (of work completed before 1970). Of the 135 artists installed on these floors only 19 are women, 6%. Temkin asked that this meeting be "off the record" but agreed that I would report on its perimeters and my impressions.
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Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. There are now more than 100 biennales around the world; Venice is often called "the most important" of them. The main show of this year's Venice Biennale is the work of Daniel Birnbaum, a well-respected 46-year-old Swedish critic and curator. His "Making Worlds" attains an enervating inertia of exhibitions and brings us to a terminal state of what we'll call "the ... read more...

The three Charles Ray installations at Matthew Marks right now, all brilliant examples of post-minimalist/conceptual sculpture, each created in the late 80s and new to New York, rattled my perceptions, jangled my faculties, and made me go "Wow!" They exemplify a drug-addled view of the world. Ray's sculptures, part of a long tradition of minimal installations, are also forerunners to much of the theatrical Festivalism of recent times such as Maurizio Cattelan and Olafur Eliasson. ... read more...

I've been at the Venice Biennale for a day and a half. I'm just getting over latecomer's remorse, brought on by my having skipped last week's press preview and the opening hoopla. The best thing I've seen so far is the focused survey of the work of Bruce Nauman in -- ta-da! -- the US pavilion (below). My Worst in Show award was a three-way tie between Australia, Japan, and France. ... read more...

Francis Bacon, whose centenary is being marked by a Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective which opened last week, is the Irish-born English artist whom the English consider their Achilles: a truculent hero rising from the turbulence, an outlaw god. Indeed, the first word of Homer's Iliad comes to mind when thinking about his paintings and tumultuous life: "Rage." ... read more...

"The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984" is less a critical survey of a highly influential aesthetic than a feel-good class reunion. Rather than opt for scholarship and tough choices, curator Douglas Eklund cultivated a gang's-all-here coziness. It's a huge show, with hundreds of objects, books, posters, films, and videos, and works by 30 artists. And it's fantastic that the fuddy-duddy Met is finally thinking about recent art. It needs to do so, more often and better. ... read more...

Right now there's a short video at David Zwirner Gallery that has some of the art world up in arms. Adel Abdessemed, 38, who was born in Algeria and now lives in New York, is a big deal on the international circuit. He had a one-person show at P.S. 1 last year, was included in the last Venice Biennale, and has had numerous solo museum exhibitions. The work that has people furious is 'Usine', a 1:27-minute color video made in Mexico depicting a bunch of different animal and insect species thrown ... read more...

In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. The New Museum's flawed but tantalizing new triennial, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus" puts this kind of art behind us and points to what might lie beyond that re... read more...

The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear. The same weekend I saw so many dealers braving the odds at art fairs, I attended the debut of not one but two new art spaces. The energy in both venues was about feeling for the outlines of a changing configuration, looking for paths between the difficult and the iffy, and using the extraordinary human an... read more...

We're on a historical cusp. No one knows what will come next. But in the art world, an aesthetic sorting out is already beginning. Partly this is a natural process and doesn't necessarily mean these artists are bad or not passionate. But the hypermarket that justly extended the careers of many artists also delayed the winnowing process of many others. Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in... read more...

With Wall Street in self-inflicted ruin it might seem ridiculous to argue that the art market is less ethical than the stock market. Yet that was the position taken last month by art dealers Richard Feigen, Michael Hue-Williams and collector Adam Lindemann in a debate sponsored by the Rosenkranz Foundation at Rockefeller University, New York. They faced artist Chuck Close, critic Jerry Saltz, and auctioneer Amy Cappellazzo, who defended the integrity of the salesroom and the art world in general... read more...

Midway through "Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective," a show I expected to be good but uneven, I found myself stunned. I had just been through several galleries filled with his early work--a painting of a fragmenting Guggenheim Museum, a photo of Kippenberger holding a bomb with the World Trade Center behind him, a brown Ford sprinkled with oat flakes, a mannequin of the artist standing in a corner, and what looks like a self-portrait bearing the title The Mother of Joseph Beuys. Then, ... read more...

Much lauded and feted artists are nothing new to history. But the megawatt VIP "Art Star," whose antics and excesses helped to define the recent pre-recession era's idea of artistic success, is now (until the art market can support fun, folly and rock-star style fantasy) a thing of the past.

Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors. It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work ... read more...

Right now at David Zwirner Gallery, you can dip into one of the weirder artistic rivers of the last 40 years and behold--or participate in--On Kawara's mad epic sculpture-performance 'One Million Years'. The Japanese-born, New York-based artist's rarely seen work is centered around a desk and two chairs in a windowed booth at the center of the otherwise almost empty Zwirner gallery. During business hours, two volunteers sit inside the room. One man and one woman take turns reading progressive da... read more...

In the closing days of 'Pour Your Body Out (7354 Meters)', Pipilotti Rist's ravishing wrap-around video atrium installation at MoMA, the place has been packed every day. Mothers have been making playdates in the atrium, letting kids run around while they gather on the large round couch. Visitors bring computers and work here, or listen to iPods, or chat or doze or read. Last Monday I got an intriguing mass e-mail from the artist Cheryl Donegan and the poet Kim Rosenfield, announcing an unsponsor... read more...

When the purse strings tighten up at museums, the institutions usually cut back and cancel shows. That's exactly the wrong reaction. In fact, now is a good time for them to loosen up - a chance to breathe and experiment a little - and go for the juicy solution lurking in their own basements. Inviting more artists to curate more exhibitions from museum storage would not only save money; all sorts of unexpected objects, ideas, and narratives would pop out. To its credit, since 1989 MoMA has had ju... read more...

Andrew Wyeth, the most famous American painter that almost no one in the art world ever thought of or cared much about, died in his sleep, in his home near Philadelphia, at the age of 91. Known for his sketchy, dry, goldenrod-and-ochre-colored scenes of working farms, rundown sawmills, nature studies, working people, military garb, and rustic interiors -- he was very good at depicting peeling paint and rotting wood -- Wyeth, who was the son of the well-known illustrator N.C. Wyeth, is responsibl... read more...

I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste. It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to--as Walt Whitman put it-- "contain multitudes." I am not talking about messiness, schlock, theatricality, or ambition. I am thinking of Paul McCarthy's excremental installations, Peter Saul's twisted painte... read more...

The deliciously named Swiss miss Pipilotti Rist, who for two decades has been ravishing viewers with her fiesta-colored video visions, has risen to new heights of trippy bliss. Her opulently beautiful 25-by-200-foot wraparound video at MoMA--complete with two round breast-shaped projector pods protruding from the walls and close-ups of pink tulips, a black pig, and a fleshy nude--is catnip for the eye and a hormonal rush for an institution badly in need of one.
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Jerry Saltz follows his defining moments of 2008 with his favourite New York shows of the year, including Tino Sehgal, Pipilotti Rist, Jeffrey Wells and Cindy Sherman - below), plus one stand-out event of 2008 - the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics - and a few worst shows of the year.

Jerry Saltz looks back at some of the best shows and trends of 2008, from 'toy art' and major exhibitions by women to the best photography and street art shows. Top of the list, though, is Saltz's 'eye-opening moment' of the year, Urs Fischer's 38-by-16-foot crater at Gavin Brown's Enterprise (below).

The last time money left the art world, intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries, and a few of them have become the best in the world. Now, as money is leaving art again, history could repeat itself--especially in two New York neighborhoods, where you can feel experimentation percolating.

Art Basel Miami Beach opens tomorrow, 4 December, and among the highlights of the fair's programme this year is Art Projects, a series of 7 installations by individual artists from 7 countries, including Olaf Breuning and Ai Weiwei. These will be displayed in the public areas around Miami Beach, and free shuttle buses will be on hand to take visitors on a 90-minute tour of the projects. For more information click here. Next week we'll be publishing reports from the fair by Jerry Saltz and Anthon... read more...

Cindy Sherman's is the face that launched a thousand theories. The best-known, most influential, least criticized, most lionized artist to emerge since Bruce Nauman, Sherman has a ruthless one-track mind whose powers of observation and parody have given us a rogue's gallery of archetypes, imaginary beings, demented dorks, ghouls, historical characters, and people she sees. Today, she's essentially doing what she's done since the mid-seventies: taking photographs of herself in female drag. ... read more...

I have always wanted to have sex in a museum. To me museums are ecstasy machines, places to experience rapture, and the real thing is the real thing. So I jumped at what seemed like an unbelievable chance to carry out my fantasy: an opportunity to spend the night with my wife on a rotating queen-size bed fitted out with satin sheets on the sixth ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum. The work, Revolving Hotel Room, is Carsten Höller's major contribution to "theanyspacewhatever" at the ... read more...

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style. Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

Against the backdrop of the collapse of Lehmann Brothers and the prevalent sense of financial doom at London's Frieze art fair, Jerry Saltz argues that, whilst recessions are hard on people they are not bad for art: 'The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but was also reborn. New generations took the stage; new communities spawned energy; things opened up; deadwood washed away.' ... read more...

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years. My rants mount when I see work from the last two years of his life, when he was in an amazing state of hellish grace. From February 1888, when he moved from Paris to Arles, to July 27, 1890, when he shot himself, Van Gogh painted a string of staggering masterpieces, including The Night Café and The Starry Night. These two forays into the known, unknown, inner, and outer worlds form the core of MoMA's "V... read more...

In this extract from curator Paco Barragan's new book on art fairs - several of which open in London today (Frieze, Scope, Zoo) - he argues that it is the curator who holds the key to reinventing these economically driven events and injecting them with cultural and social content.

Well, painting isn't dead again, and in particular there is some great abstract and minimalist work on view right now, from Joanna Pousette-Dart at Moti Hasson, Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum (below) and Chris Johanson at Deitch Projects.

In the late sixties, Martha Rosler became known for a so-so series of collages titled "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful." She juxtaposed images of models, home décor, and the Vietnam War: A Vietnamese woman carried a bleeding baby in an unsullied American home, housewives dutifully cleaned battlefields, and so on. Four decades later, Rosler turns out not to have changed the look of her own work at all. In her current skin-deep effort at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Rosler tries to turn back the... read more...

More than 80 exhibitions opened in Chelsea on the first big night of the art season, a couple of weeks ago. Most are mediocre, as usual, and this many so-so shows early on makes one suspect that a pattern is forming. But amid mediocrity, the needle does seesaw, and three shows (one good, one bad, one terrible) stood out as I made the rounds. The shockmeister Andres Serrano has opened a new show as well, and it's another doozy (below) - skip it in favour of Neil Campbell's pitch-perfect way of bl... read more...

While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement--movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship. It's a shift from theatricality to actual drama, from art about selling art to an art that's serious and ironic at the same time, eager for audiences but not slick and accessorized. Some... read more...

Edward Durrell stone's 2 Columbus Circle, opened as Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art in 1964 and later housing the city's Cultural Affairs Department and several generations of pigeons, reopens September 27 as the Museum of Arts and Design. Art critic Jerry Saltz and architecture critic Justin Davidson toured the galleries, remade by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, then sat down to discuss the building, the institution, and their reactions. ... read more...

Eating at El Bulli is less dinner than performance art. Adrià seems to me a Picasso of food, having moved beyond classical cuisine into another realm. (Although to top off the session, he whipped up the best traditional seafood lunch I've ever had, remarking, "In order to do what I do, you first have to be able to do this.") Adrià looks and acts like Picasso too: about the same height and build, with wild dark eyes and palpable sexual energy. I half-expected to see him parading on the beach in... read more...

With two of New York's most important museums both appointing new directors in the last few weeks, Jerry Saltz gives his advice on what the priorities should be for the new heads of the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.