Radcliffe Bailey at the McNay: Back to School
There’s this faction of contemporary artists who seem to feel at pains to jargonize, obfuscate and otherwise Other-ize their own work. If you need to have read Derrida and to have seen the whole canon to get what an artist is doing, that’s cool. But cool is a value of middling worth. The pernicious cycle of [...]
The Ten List: Art Loves Baseball
It’s the All Star break, a time when the very best professional baseball players have to travel for work and the rest get a four-day vacation. It’s also the dead of summer, when the Houston art world generally slows to a trickle and creative group shows compete for the attention of whoever’s not in Aspen. [...]
Radcliffe Bailey “Memory and Medicine” and Tropical Storm Allison
Radcliffe Bailey’s show “Memory as Medicine” opened at the McNay last week. I first saw Bailey’s work in “The Magic City,” his ill-fated show at the Blaffer Gallery in 2001. Water is a recurring theme for the artist and it is strangely notable that Bailey’s Blaffer show opened during a flood. Tropical Storm Allison was [...]