12 Stories That Made Us Look at the Art World Anew

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/t-magazine/best-art-stories.html

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This year, we visited the famously reclusive Jasper Johns at his barn in the Berkshire Mountains, caught up with Nick Cave and his fanciful Soundsuits on Chicago’s Northwest Side, looked at how and why artists exchange their work and tried to figure out the most important pieces of art made in the last 50 years. Below, a roundup of our favorite art stories of 2019.

Sought after by Spike Lee, Stanley Kubrick and Solange Knowles alike, the Los Angeles-based visual artist is changing representations of blackness in museums and beyond. Jafa offered O’Grady, one of T’s writers at large, a deeply personal explanation of the vernacular of his films, which he calls “black visual intonation.” He also pointed out the gray-scale Incredible Hulk-inspired cutout in his studio, which he considers a self-portrait. Read more.

A visit to the 88-year-old so-called hermit of Sharon, Conn., found the artist in a surprisingly warm mood, riffing on Rauschenberg and Warhol, and included a trip to the barn where he was storing his new paintings. Has the way he works changed over time? “Probably,” he told Miller, T’s arts editor, though after a momentary pause, he continued: “It’s hard to say how. I think I produce fewer works now. I assume that has to do with age, but I don’t know. And I don’t know what other people think of my production. I’ve occasionally worked on something for a very long time, so it doesn’t seem like I’m producing anything, but eventually something will get done.” Read more.

A profile of Andrea Fraser, who has spent her career examining the internal machinery of art institutions, inevitably turns into a survey of the state of the art museum in 2019, and its long history of fostering an American plutocracy. “The art world is easy to roast — its most absurd characters are often the most oblivious — and it tends to skewer itself without any outside assistance,” Lescaze writes. “But Fraser’s work is not mere polemics or parody. She bares her own insecurities as she examines those of museums, galleries, viewers and patrons.” Read more.

T set out to answer the impossible question of which art works define the contemporary age, with the help of a few artists and curators. Argument, some consensus and earnest self-reflection ensued. Naturally, when re-evaluating the canon of the last five decades, there were notable omissions. But, as La Force notes in her introduction, “this list — which is ordered chronologically, from oldest work to most recent — is who we circled around, who we defended, who we questioned, and who we, perhaps most of all, wish might be remembered.” Read more.

We put the artist and the architect in a room together and let them talk about whatever came to mind, which included prisons, Legos and Gehry’s long-ago arrest for marijuana possession. “When I started in architecture, I was aware that I was coming into a world where the cities were being built quick and ugly, and there was a lot of denial,” Gehry said. “People hated it, but they didn’t seem to care they were doing it. I was curious about how you connect to that denial, so I picked the worst material that everyone really hates, chain-link, and said, ‘What if I tried to take chain-link and make it part of the art, part of the beauty? What if it became more positive?’” Read more.

As more and more smaller and midsize galleries are forced to close because of New York City’s carnivorous real-estate market, we took a look at how galleries run out of a person’s apartment (and one in the shed out back) have continued to flourish. “These days, few dealers still sleep in the quarters above their galleries,” explains Chiaverina. “But proprietors of venues like 15 Orient — a gallery inside a moody Victorian house in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn — still think of their space in the lineage of salon-style venues.” Read more.

The esteemed painter answered T’s artist questionnaire ahead of his retrospective at the Dallas Contemporary, “My Life as a Man,” which brought together just over 100 images of men made by an artist known for depicting women. Currin recounted the worst studio he ever had and his failed attempt at getting his children interested in the classic TV show “The Wire.” On his worst habit: “Vodka tonics and Words With Friends, buttered bread, Twitter. I don’t post on it, but I do like to look at it. There’s a few people that I check every day. Iowa Hawk. He’s a guy who’s into cars. He’s very, very funny.” Read more.

O’Grady looks at the shadow economy of artist trades, concluding that artists make the best collectors: “They are the last people to think of art as a commodity and the first to select the work they want to surround themselves with for reasons of sensibility or sentiment; a trade offers a crucial back channel to ownership that all the money in the world can hardly grant.” However, some trades have gone terribly awry — like the time Édouard Manet took a knife to a painting that Edgar Degas had made for him of Manet and his wife, Suzanne, that perhaps all too accurately conveyed a sense of marital ennui. Read more.

Cave took T around his huge new studio in Chicago and shared the back story behind his “Soundsuits,” the wearable sculptures that have become some of the most beloved of all contemporary art objects. Following their phenomenal success, explains O’Grady, “Cave’s focus has expanded to the culture that produced them, with shows that more directly implicate viewers and demand civic engagement around issues like gun violence and racial inequality. But increasingly, the art that interests Cave is the art he inspires others to make.” Read more.

The 23-year-old up-and-coming painter Devon Rodriguez works out of his grandmother’s South Bronx apartment and is known for his hyper-realistic paintings often featuring subjects he finds on the New York subway. Ever since he graduated from high school, he has been painting eight hours a day, five days a week, rarely doing anything else. (“I only have, like, five friends,” he told Reid, laughing.) We caught up with him before he headed to D.C. for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery — an esteemed prize for which he was a finalist. Read more.

T’s features director did a deep dive into the life of Gilot, an artist who had a 10-year affair with Picasso, and wrote all about it in a 1964 memoir that was brought back into print earlier this year. “I think it’s very important in life to have no regrets,” Gilot told La Force. “‘Regrets’ meaning not having done this or that. Well, it’s much better to have done this or that, and, therefore, it had a result. That is the objective in real life, and then you cope with it as well as you can.” Read more.

As part of T Presents, our spotlight on 15 new creative talents, we profiled Theresa Chromati, whose paintings walk the line between figurative and abstract. In her newer works, the Guyanese-American artist has shifted the focus from her community to her own inner world, creating whirlpools of swirling bodies and floating parts that together form a reflection of the artist herself. “Once you stop hiding, you find more ease in how you move and how you’ve given yourself permission to understand yourself, to love yourself and to demand love and understanding from others,” Chromati told Cooper. “At that point, there’s no reason to have the mask.” Read more.