As goes Avedon, so goes Parr?
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 [...]
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 [...]