Yayoi Kusama is crazy but still going strong

Yayoi Kusama is still going strong at eighty-two years of age; the charmingly eccentric Japanese artist, who sold a painting for record-breaking $5.1 million in 2008 (highest for any living female artist at the time), has been granted a dizzying 14-roomretrospective by the Tate Modern in London. Personally I can’t help but admire Kusama; throughout her entire life, she has been a creative […]

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The Mona Lisa in Spain?

I don’t have any personal investment in the Mona Lisa — don’t love it, don’t hate it, it is what it is — but as arguably the most famous painting in the world, I was surprised to see how little buzz there was surrounding the discoveryofitsearliestcopy. Art conservators at the Prado museum in Madrid have identified […]

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Art Predictions for 2012

Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune has made three predictions (with an introductory caveat that translates to, “just guessing, after all!”) for the coming year. The first one strikes me as a no-brainer; Viveros-Faune talks about the “aesthetics of decline,” the art movement that reflects the increasingly drab socioeconomic climate, spurred on by the increasingly heated […]

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