In 2024, I made a vow to never base my art criticism on wall labels. My decision came after reading reactions to that year's Whitney Biennial. "If every label in 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' the 81st installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?" asked Jackson Arn in the New Yorker. (He went on to suggest that the overall show would have been much better.)
I don't know what you want to know, says Anne Imhof, three-quarters of the way into our interview. Her cautious smile, between curtains of jet black hair, changes into a sceptical pout. I have just quoted a headline at Imhof, one of Germany's most important contemporary artists, that described her 2025 New York show as a bad Balenciaga ad.
The title might seem a little ironic, considering Hicks has covered arts and culture in the Pacific Northwest since 1978. But the heart of the argument - that critics more often stand in between their readers and art, representing a barrier to deeper understanding and appreciation, rather than offering them "a fresh perspective, a new way of entering into the discussion that any decent work of art invites" - echoed a sentiment I've held for a long time.
Bless me, reader, for I have sinned. For 40 years Moses wandered in the wilderness. And for roughly the same amount of time I have stumbled through the landmines of contemporary culture, wearing the sackcloth of the most extreme form of penitent journalist. I have been a critic. Well, apparently I have. That's what everyone tells me. Lord knows I've denied it over the years.
Stellweg was a pivotal figure in the Latin American art world, working mainly between Mexico City and New York. The founder and editor-in-chief of the bilingual art magazine Artes Visuales, she went on to become an early promoter of Latin American artists including Liliana Porter, Ana Mendieta and Luis Camnitzer through her New York galleries Stellweg-Seguy Gallery and Carla Stellweg Latin American & Contemporary Art.
In 2002, Thelma Golden curated a show at the Studio Museum in Harlem titled "Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art." It was a survey of Black artists who were interested in representing the Black figure in a way that refuted narratives that made exotic caricatures of Black people. These were artists whose work was popular among Black audiences but largely shut out of white, mainstream art circles.
THE PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS a Black man in rags and fetters being led through the street by a white man robed in white, trailed by a flock of spectators. The year was 1968, the setting an arts festival in Amalfi called Arte povera più azioni povere (Poor Art Plus Poor Actions); the scene was part of a play, L'uomo ammaestrato (The Trained Man), created by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and his theater collective, Lo Zoo.
The Danish agency for palaces and culture is reportedly removing the 4x6 metre Den Store Havfrue (the Big Mermaid) because it does not align with the cultural heritage of the 1910 landmark.
