Lynn Barber lives in Rapid City, South Dakota. She has degrees in microbiology and law, and intermittently works as a patent attorney. She enjoys playing the hammer dulcimer and the concertina. She’s married to a shy guy named Dave, who holds advanced degrees in meteorology and theology. Both are members of the ACLU and are [...]

Amon G. Carter was a man of iron will, blunt charm and big ideas. Her father’s daughter, Ruth Carter Stevenson, inherited his intractibility and vision but thinly cloaked it with her own brand of old-school femininity. Her death on January 6 almost completely severs Fort Worth’s last links with the larger-than-life figures who made it [...]

My first and likely only prediction for visual art in 2013: thanks to the retrospective that was organized by and debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ken Price will lose his cult status and be embraced by the unwashed masses, and perhaps even by Michael Kimmelman. As a result, the legacy of [...]

Dave Hickey recently announced his retirement from art criticism, citing his disgust with the circus that the art world—particularly the world of contemporary art—has become. He also, in an article published online by The Guardian/The Observer, noted he’s working on a book that will be a “snarky diatribe on Christianity.” I met Dave in Austin about [...]

  Forget iPhone 5. Instead of buying the latest Apple gadget, I’ve added Magritte VI to my credit card bill. Nothing Apple sells stirs my covetousness like a book on Magritte–and when that book adds to The Menil Foundation’s catalogue raisonne, well, Katy bar the door. Unlike its five predecessors, this new one offers color reproductions of all the [...]

Martin Parr’s newish book, Up and Down Peachtree, represents the South’s shiny capital with a mix of mean-spiritedness and generosity that recalls Richard Avedon’s long-ago treatment of the American West. As much or more then than now, the Western United States was the golden land that addressed aspirations of leaving the Rust Belt and other manifestations [...]

I was a late-comer to Francesca Woodman‘s pictures but liked them right away. That was around 2003, and Woodman’s surrealism provided me with a lyrical counterpart to René Magritte’s poetically banal imagery. Wrong-headed, probably, but I seem to respond to the vaguely familiar at least as often as I do to the totally new. Reading a new book [...]

  This is an epic year for England. Well, for the UK, but mostly England. The Diamond Jubilee. The Olympics. The Tories sinking ever deeper into their own doo doo. Titanic’s centennial and Tate Modern’s full-dress survey for Damien Hirst–the artist’s first in his native land. The YBAs turning 50. I managed to miss many of the actual [...]

I’ve loved Mona Hatoum‘s work since I first saw it in 1993 at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens–an experience that still emerges from the mists of time on a regular basis, as one of those signal encounters with contemporary art. The exhibition was called Four Rooms and Hatoum was one of four artists, but her’s is [...]

  Ever discover what you want to write about something, after reading what someone else wrote about something else? Happens to me all the time—most recently, when I read an article from The Guardian that Rainey posted on facebook. It was written by Alain de Botton, an essayist with many good ideas about aesthetics and [...]

  A few years ago, when I still was making and exhibiting sculpture out of Lego pieces, I typically dismantled large-scale works after they were shown so that I could reuse the bricks for new installations. There are a few things that I saved, including a blue pedestal and an irregularly shaped sculpture that people usually say looks like [...]

      Re-booting my brain after being challenged–Challenged!–on my Feeding the Beast blog.   So I’ve found a couple sources of useful ideas. One is a facebook post by Ken Johnson, whose book, Are You Experienced: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art, I reviewed a couple of months ago. Johnson usually posts questions that test the viability of various ideas. His latest concerns an article [...]

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Looking at two new books that recently landed in my lap, I’m reminded of Dave Hickey’s description of the therapeutic institution. That would be the museum or ICA or biennial whose displays were, like nasty tasting medicine, supposed to be “good” for the viewer. In contrast to such visual puritanism, Hickey argued for exhibitions whose visual [...]

        Hundreds of artworks ranging from the sublime to pure schlock, artists acting like candidates for public office, local media in a state of unabashed boosterism, and a voting system that widens the digital divide. Such is ArtPrize, an event guaranteed to induce alternating bouts of dismay and enthusiasm, such that the hardened art professional collapses in exhausted [...]

Material girl that I am, I love books. Holding them, smelling them, turning their pages, penciling notes in their margins. Finishing one and closing it with a satisfying thap. The Internet is astonishing: I use it daily. But I can’t have a physical relationship with it. Navigating cyberspace can’t compare to meandering in and out [...]

It’s not the elusive Marfa Lights or the filming of Edna Ferber’s Giant or, for that matter, its stalwart ranching community, for which the town of Marfa, Texas, is best known. Even outside of the international art community, Marfa means Donald Judd, Judd’s art projects and the Chinati Foundation, the world’s largest collection of artworks [...]

  It glides in under the radar while I’m enjoying a patch of midday sun or clear night sky: without warning, I miss Texas. Not the heat and air pollution and lack of regard for the public realm, but the art. Since moving back to my home state of Michigan after nearly 25 years in [...]

It's been more than 150 years since Baudelaire wrote his essay Why Sculpture is Boring…

Every five days or so, my boys pester me to take them to the grocery store, so they can buy more Sponge Bob toys out of the vending machine there.