#pop-art-critique

#pop-art-critique

Anna Holmes defines 'hype aversion' as a reflex against being told what to like, suggesting that popularity can create pressure rather than signal quality. This feeling can lead to a deliberate choice to resist mainstream culture.

Bondi's official DOJ portrait was reportedly spotted in the trash mere minutes after Donald Trump gave her the boot. Just straight to the bin, like last week's takeout and this week's credibility.

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

"In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict, and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what truly mattered: remodeling the Lincoln bathroom in the White House," reads a bronze plaque affixed to the work.

We might be exposed to more ads and commercials today than ever before in human history, but the idea of advertising itself is certainly not a new concept. According to Instapage, the first signs of advertisements actually appeared in ancient Egyptian steel carvings from 2000 BC. Meanwhile, the first printed ad was published in 1472, when William Caxton decided to advertise a book by posting flyers on church doors in England.

AT FIRST GLANCE, the phrase "avant-garde advertising" might seem like a contradiction in terms: The avant-garde is assumed to be inherently anti-capitalist and the realm of advertising crassly commercial. But the involvement of avant-garde artists with advertising is in fact rich, complex, and long-standing, encompassing a full century of collaborations, critiques, and reworkings of all sorts. That entanglement-in all its diversity-is the topic

The reason why useful art will change the world is that art, as we have come to know it since the 18th century, is the subject of 'neoliberal occupation', government regulation and commercial sponsorship. It has become useless, but not because the aesthetic exists in a Kantian separate world, but because, like everything else, including ourselves, it has become part of the neoliberal circulation of commodities, instrumentalised by the creative industries.

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.)

"As I stood and looked at it on a drizzly gray day," John Yau writes of looking at a radiant painting by Edward Zutrau, "I forgot that it was raining." That's what art can do - stop you in your tracks, make you forget absolutely everything save for that essential encounter between you and the work.

I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.

As the administration continues its attacks on culture, the president is targeting a building near the National Mall with several remarkable New Deal-era murals about social security, which remain as relevant as the day they were painted. Reporter Aaron Short brings us inside the fight to save this gem of a building, which a new petition describes as a "Sistine Chapel" of artworks centering working-class communities that the government abandoned during the Great Depression (and continues to neglect today).