Today’s upscale airport lounge may seem the embodiment of international chic (MIA excluded, of course), but there was a time, from the Twenties through the Fifties, when nothing could be more cosmopolitan than the lobby of a fine hotel. In the words of German critic Siegfried Kracauer, such lobbies represented…
According to artist Jack Bowman, performance art entails the following: It must be brief, unprecedented, and relevant. It involves an audience with taste (smell and sounds). It should occupy the environment with specific objects and actions for a specific amount of time, and it should (preferably) involve a small audience…
Though critics have been the witnesses, commentators, and archivists of modern art’s important achievements, they remain dubious figures who can be found “roaming through culture, looking for prey,” as aphorist Mason Cooley once said. Regardless of our take on critics’ motivations, they do serve a necessary purpose. Artists measure their…
Louis Laloy, a critic, musicologist, and drug-addict célèbre, once told Jean Cocteau: “Some things should be tried only once.” Laloy was referring to opium, but when it comes to writing about a figure like Pablo Picasso, I feel I’m ready to heed his advice. This is why: Picasso is, arguably,…
Recent artists’ exhibitions such as “Making Up Carolyn” at Worm-Hole Laboratory, “The Last Show” at The House, and a flurry of articles in the media have put the issue of gentrification in the forefront of the news. (As I write this, The House is being demolished to make way for…
Thanks to a group of individuals with vision, our arts scene keeps developing. Usually the vision is unfunded, and they start from scratch. So realizing their dreams requires a great deal of resolve. Two of those people with vision and resolve are Susan Caraballo and José-Carlos Diaz. New Times spoke…
Cakewalk: Aesthetic experience and erogenous pleasure have always been close relatives, to be sure. But rather than any genuine countercultural agenda, artists in 2004 are armed with a stylist’s finely tuned eye for the retro, a fascination with the abject and unlovable, a salacious eye for soft porn, and an…
In glass blowing, the gaffer shapes a molten mass of glass by blowing air into it through a tube. Around the first millennium B.C., Syrians invented the craft, which quickly became a rich export to all parts of the Roman Empire. These early vessels had a decorative purpose (shaped as…
i am the resurrection: Works by Daniel Arsham, Ian Cooper, Jay Heikes, and Rachel Howe circle cautiously around Goth culture and the spate of recent school shootings by teenagers. The works suggest the saturation of violence permeating contemporary life, and explore the twin afflictions of victimization and vengeance plaguing youth…
i am the resurrection: Works by Daniel Arsham, Ian Cooper, Jay Heikes, and Rachel Howe circle cautiously around Goth culture and the spate of recent school shootings by teenagers. The works suggest the saturation of violence permeating contemporary life, and explore the twin afflictions of victimization and vengeance plaguing youth…
i am the resurrection: Works by Daniel Arsham, Ian Cooper, Jay Heikes, and Rachel Howe circle cautiously around Goth culture and the spate of recent school shootings by teenagers. The works suggest the saturation of violence permeating contemporary life, and explore the twin afflictions of victimization and vengeance plaguing youth…
As much as Miami has grown as an arts capital, there still is much to be done. The art explosion fostered by the migration of Art Basel has been terrific. Yet our city will not really advance unless we can sustain our art development, and this will not happen without…
Did you know that Miami has the highest rate of violent crime in America? We are also the second most stressful city in the nation (after Tacoma, Washington), according to the latest report from Sperling’s Best Places USA (www.bestplaces.net). They put it this way: “Miami has the highest violent crime…
All My Lies Are Wishes: Rubén Torres-Llorca is a conceptualist with superb craftsmanship. His photo series features blurred images, laid-over symbols, and tangential titles. They work like a personal domestic still-life sequence, though a bit cryptic. The show’s pièce de résistance is a spider-web installation, made of rope and filled…
All My Lies Are Wishes: Rubén Torres-Llorca is a conceptualist with superb craftsmanship. His photo series features blurred images, laid-over symbols, and tangential titles. They work like a personal domestic still-life sequence, though a bit cryptic. The show’s pièce de résistance is a spider-web installation, made of rope and filled…
All My Lies Are Wishes: Rubén Torres-Llorca is a conceptualist with superb craftsmanship. His photo series features blurred images, laid-over symbols, and tangential titles. They work like a personal domestic still-life sequence, though a bit cryptic. The show’s pièce de résistance is a spider-web installation, made of rope and filled…
Love & Slavery in Miami: Willie Keddell is an artist who tills the fields of perception. The urban furrows of marginality are his seedbed of imagination. His work’s soulful aesthetic is abundant with concrete decay, the graffiti of untrod spaces, and the plaintive lament of the dispossessed. With assistance from…
For years Gustavo Acosta has untiringly pursued an imaginary space of architecture between the future and the past, nostalgia and satire, nineteenth-century Friedrich Schinkel and twentieth-century Charles Jencks. Check out his show “Historias Recurrentes” at Praxis International Art. First we must understand the influence of architectural representation, starting with the…
Every Atom: Natalia Benedetti’s new work might be considered an offspring of Warhol’s marathon Empire State Building film, but amped-up by technology and a hefty NoDoz factor. In Benedetti’s take, a lazy exterior shot of a glass-walled apartment building on Biscayne Bay, endlessly looping in a tight grid, shimmers with…
Appalachia: Overloaded with just way too much, Gean Moreno’s “Appalachia” is more like horror vacui, a reflection of our times. Technically they are (executed as) drawings, but these are more hypercollages with glued bits of everything you can imagine: tiny trinkets, diverse stamps, laced curios, motley paper surfaces that offer…
The issue of Latin American art — what it is and whether our city is a center for it — comes up in Miami’s art circles almost daily. In truth Miami — for better or worse — feels like a Latin American city within the United States. But we are…
New Paintings: Emilio Perez’s lush, eye-popping new work conveys a lyrical fervor that seems to echo the big-wave surfer’s rush as he drops into an overhead tube. Perez romps adroitly across vibrant, churning swirls of chaos and serenity in a world all his own. This is clean, wicked stuff you…
