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Pick from More Themes
John Haber
in New York City
Preceding ideas!
 Must art serve or fight back?
Traditionally, art holds out a pristine world of beauty. It serves God and princes, but it stands apart from politics, science, and culture. Can this age recover the connections? Must gallery politics and museum empires mirror national and global ones?
- Theory
- Arts funding in a free society
- Why art makes headlines
- Teabaggers, pluralism, and shock art
- Complicity and the culture industry
- Complicity and the art world
- The imperative of political art
- Art's place at Ground Zero
- Political art: an interview
- Art, text, and their censors
- Neoconservatives
- Moral truth and opinion
- Science, art, and Postmodernism
- Science's twist on pluralism in the arts
- How New York stole the idea of the sublime
- Art—of the 1980s or now—and "civilization"
- Originality and the birth of the museum
- Romanticism and museums as battlegrounds
- When markets drive art and culture
- Academics, collectors, and niche markets
- Markets, old masters, geniuses, and gifts
- Museum blockbusters on the cheap
- Quality or diversity: The Brooklyn Museum
Practice My reviews discuss some other outsiders in art, particularly blacks and Jews:
- Benton's dark American populism
- Managing "The Ungovernables"
- Artists visit Bearden's Block
- Gay men away from the furor
- "Civic Action" and the ideal city
- Drawing on revolutionary France
- African Americans spiral outward
- Real outrage and fake transgression
- Ligon, text, sex, and blackness
- The last newspaper and the Web
- From migrant labor to Katrina
- Race as a usable past—or pasts
- World finance and Greek tragedy
- Museums as civic space—or gallery?
- Art and race in a state of emergency
- American art's machine in the garden
- Race, sunlight, and American stories
- "Négritude" under western eyes
- Art, memorials, and the marketplace
- Iran and the west turn inside-out
- Dumas or Jacir lost in the labyrinth
- Product placement at the Armory
- Eying the Far East and finding religion
- Tooker's politics back from the dead
- Reinhardt's purity, praxis, and politics
- Multiculturalism and faith "After Nature"
- Celebrity architects and second lives
- Child's play versus environmentalism
- Refugees and post-African identity
- Art and the Cultural Revolution
- Linking love, war, sex, and violence
- From slavery to Katrina's devastation
- Why artists are trashing Chelsea
- "The Price of Everything" in art
- An alternative space still "Not for Sale"
- Manet to Picasso, facing a firing squad
- A black artist's roller-coaster ride
- An accidental masterpiece of advertising
- Blackness, whiteness, and abstraction
- The "Frequency" of emerging black art
- Textbooks face the "language police"
- Whose political life is this anyway?
- Money swears—and even gossips
- At the Modern, who is paying for all this?
- Claiming nature for the American flag
- Monuments between ground and sky
- Galleries as fragile institutions
- Paul Kos's red pawn in their game
- The primitive's "American Effect"
- Beckmann and a nation's masks
- An official language of grieving
- Wrestling with blackness freestyle
- Modernism's evil empires?
- "Mirroring Evil" or absorbing it?
- Barney's video art as blockbuster
- A Romantic plays museum politics
- How many lives had Anthony Blunt?
- Abramovic's terrifying ocean view
- Claude, Poussin, and their world
- Between ritual and performance
- Surrealism's sex and violence
- Gestures toward the Enlightenment
- Evans and the underside of America
- Lawrence narrates black history
- Vermeer and a city's dreams
- The museum as muse
- An "American century"?
- The Renaissance, "high" and "low"
- Art's carnival and marketplace
- Soviet bureaucracy and the NEA
- Powerlessness after an election
- An alternative space . . .
- . . . or just another museum?
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- Political artists feel your pain
- Rivera's murals and revolutions
- Acting very African American
- Welcoming back Islamic art
- Ground Zero as a memorial
- "September 11" without 9/11
- "Ostalgie" and the Berlin Wall
- Murder, exile, and community
- Alternative spaces and histories
- From Neoclassicism to fascism
- Apartheid past black and white
- A reasonable torture chamber
- The urban revolution in the garden
- Photojournalism, art, and modernity
- An art collector's vicious circle
- The art and politics of obscurity
- On the road to the American dream
- "PLOT/09" and a city's military past
- Mik and staged military history
- New heavies and post-post-black
- The Rose and Brooklyn sell the store
- Fisher Landau starts her own museum
- Sprawltown's degrees of freedom
- Museum assets and financial disaster
- Academia and African Americans
- Art after 9/11 and other wars
- Posing for post-black identity
- Johnson's "new negro escapist"
- Chan's intimations of disaster
- Public sculpture in Renaissance Italy
- Post-black, post-minimal, and Puryear
- Globalization as an Asian art film
- Chelsea jump-starts fall in the city
- Has blackness become invisible?
- The Whitney's "Summer of Love"
- Black flags and invisible lines
- Botero's Abu Ghraib and gold mines
- Curating a democratic museum
- The art scene's low-grade mystery
- Monuments to empire and globalization
- After the freedom center, a backlash
- A 9/11 garden and a knock at the door
- When political art starts seeing voices
- Pop Art for the Harlem Renaissance
- Political art up in smoke or up in arms
- Can a museum rewrite art history?
- The Kabakovs as art institutions
- Pop Art, politics, or Surrealism?
- Modernism's "Primitive Discord"
- Summer sculpture tries to rebuild
- Malevich seeks political asylum
- A woman on the eve of Revolution
- Brancusi's primitivism
- Noguchi returns ads to paradise
- Empathy and courtly service
- Wojnarowicz's gay allegories
- The workshop and the art world
- The Met strikes again, at the Medieval
- The critic as museum saboteur
- Tony Smith vs the sculpture parks
- Abramovic's torturous vision
- Ellison's invisibility
- Foucault's madness
- Art from Africa
- A black artist's journey
- The modernist as Jew
- In what way am I a Jew?
- The Guggenheim as private collection
- "Shock art" and human evil
- Modernism's "imaginary museum"
- Local color and patriotic fervor
- Segal's uncanny whiteness
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 How good is video and computer art?
I used to think of video as the tedious side of art—the installations one waits on line to enter. If some artists get their way, I might never even come to the museum, and if I have to wait, I had better blame it on my ISP. But if the revolution will not be televised, are new media truly a postmodern revolution?
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- Theory
- From nonsites to Web sites
- Art and the virtual museum
- When can science enter art?
- Does virtual reality spin lies?
- Criticism with a stop button
- Is a video a performance or new media?
- Digital media, genealogies, or communities?
- Does computer art offer anything new?
- Digital photography and belief in the real
- Motion, vision, the body, and illusion: I
- Motion, vision, the body, and illusion: II
- Social media, privacy, and corporations
Practice As a critic in a new medium, I have to take in the world in pixels. Yet I consistently find video suspiciously old-fashioned:
- Video games and the eternal present
- Bells, biorhythms, and the movies
- When art and science "Attract/Repel"
- Sound art, silence, and surveillance
- Performance records without video
- Women on both sides of the camera
- Art as molecules or natural history
- Stop-action studies in hysteria
- Just's romantic and other delusions
- Fuller between science and snake oil
- Leonardo, HDTV, and Photoshop
- Art, science, smoke, and mirrors
- Broadcasting through boundaries
- "Closed Circuit" and "Family Pictures"
- A tree grows white on video
- Bird calls and meteor showers
- Douglas Gordon and "Out of Time"
- Hyperactive art or shaken perception
- Screen savers and music videos
- de Beer's house haunted by desires
- Leslie, abstraction, and the movies
- From an art fair to "One on One"
- A woman plays the art market
- Jankowski's art scene—or London's
- Barney's video art as blockbuster
- Split screens and grand opera
- Modernism pressed for time
- Three versions of a woman
- Even video gets physical
- A scream in the darkness
- Bits of novelty and appropriation
- Entelechs and a global neighborhood
- Rauschenberg's shock of the old
- Wogan's window on the floor below
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 Is the best art a fake?
Nothing is dearer to me than the creative act. Yet art history describes commissions and workshops, tradition and influence, copies and multiple castings. Pop and Minimalism even take their life from mass production. So are critics right when they look past the whole idea of authenticity?
Practice Instead of seeing through it, maybe they should see what it means. My reviews argue that originality always matters, but its meaning changes historically:
- The Renaissance copies antiquity
- Was papier collé painting or a fake?
- Otherworldly models of art today
- Cardboard guitars and card players
- Gossart "improves on" van Eyck
- Michelangelo's devils at age twelve
- Pontormo and Bronzino share a page
- A Renaissance scholar in bronze
- Photography, staged or observed
- Prince locates the real America
- Critics, catalogs, and Pollock as fakes
- Dada as everyone and no one
- From the Morgan Library to the future
- Still life, still lives, and one real tree
- Channeling Abstract Expressionism
- Authenticity and perversity
- Who stole the unfinished print?
- Tarantino, Fellini, or video art?
- Goltzius's Post-Renaissance copies
- Spain, France, and art's canon
- Drawing Leonardo back from myth
- A book with many masters
- El Greco keeps copying himself
- Bits of novelty and appropriations
- The artist as project manager
- Campin's individual and the sacred
- "The Draftsman's Art"
- van Gogh's doctor tries to get it
- The workshop, and the art world
- So who painted the Assisi frescos?
- Two artists' hand-made books
- Abstract art as Ex-AbEx
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- Toys, ego trips, and slacker art
- "Now you see it" in the mind's eye
- Finding Rembrandt in his school
- The Last Supper as simulacrum
- Conceptual art and the handmade
- Velázquez, Botticelli, and Cranach
- Wright, suburb, city, and utopia
- Illuminating the early Renaissance
- Collecting "The Age of Rembrandt"
- Bauhaus, design, and commodity
- Cimabue (or Duccio) gives way
- A passion flower's secret history
- A Swiss painter disguised as Turk
- Antonello's early apparition in oil
- Fra Angelico, maybe, in the making
- Finding Vermeer at the virginals
- Artists in and out of fashion
- Daguerre vanishes without a copy
- Lutter's negation of photography
- Abstraction disguised as videotape
- Alternative and reconstructions
- Pollock and the "derivative"
- Degas as collector
- Halley's ideological purity
- Mondrian in series
- The real Rembrandt and Goya
- Tansey's elegance and irony
- "Artspeak" or martspeak?
- Conceptual arts, plural
- The originality of the avant garde
- My own little performance piece
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 Who lies behind art's images?
Art is so obviously a thing, but it holds out tantalizing hints of the human presence. It expresses the artist; it represents people and angels; it awaits a viewer to enter its installation and its rituals. Postmodernism promises to uncover the history behind each of these images. How well does it do?
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Practice My reviews argue for remembering the presences in a work of art, but always as the humanity of a fiction:
- The Steins collect more than art
- American anarchy and Surrealism
- Expressionism versus America
- Expressionism's graphic impulse
- Art between ritual and religion
- Stieglitz, Steichen, or Strand?
- Matisse's wartime reinvention
- Inching up on the Renaissance
- Blake's attraction of opposites
- Ensor in all his carnival masks
- Bacon's art history as raw meat
- Bonnard's delayed gratification
- A color photo's decisive moment
- Morandi's still life as portraiture
- Romanticism as action painting
- Expressionism as graphic novel
- Real sex and ideal beauty
- Seurat's shades of blackness
- Demand's photographic paper trail
- Stingel's conceptual Rococo
- An engagement with Isaac's eyes
- "Closed Circuit" and "Family Pictures"
- Stubbs, horses, nature, and culture
- Picasso's seventy years in America
- When body art numbs the senses
- How Raphael learned his trade
- Goldin's deadly and erotic fairy tales
- Goya's last gasp—and then some
- Magritte's seduction of modern art
- Memling's lives in the balance
- Johns's art is falling down, falling down
- The body of the virtual landscape
- Basquiat's word and image as all image
- Rubens without a moment's hesitation
- After Lippi, a whole new perspective
- Sargent's many children—and adults
- A film seeks Vermeer's muse
- Art vanishing in an urban sprawl
- A biography of Gorky's absence
- An era's portrait in a convex mirror
- Sherman and Samaras expose art
- London's frenzy and tradition
- Whiteread's monumental negative
- Beckmann and a nation's masks
- The postmodern writer as fiction
- Claude, Poussin, and their world
- Art from Toledo ponders the human
- "Tempo" gives artists time
- Split screens and grand opera
- How many lives had Anthony Blunt?
- Abramovic's terrifying ocean view
- Three versions of a woman
- Artemisia as dutiful daughter
- Bursting Chardin's bubble
- Two brushes with the past
- Chelsea artists get physical
- Gestures toward the Enlightenment
- Brookner's or Friedrich's Romanticism
- Between the naked and the nude
- Giacometti's art with its throat cut
- Sobel, the drip, and the primitive
- Crashing de Kooning's party
- Modernism pressed for time
- Vermeer and a city's dreams
- Wrestling with blackness freestyle
- Krasner's dutiful breakthrough
- Noguchi returns ads to paradise
- Giving one's image a healthy tan
- Philosophy of art without artists
- Romanticism's active imagination
- Pomo's confessional theater
- America enters exotic landscapes
- Empathy and courtly service
- Laughter and laser-cut tears
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- Vuillard knows when to stop short
- The Renaissance portrait in Italy
- Portraits by Hals darken with age
- Romanticism's room with a view
- Coffee, Kant, and other obsessions
- Drawing or papering the walls
- Abstract Expressionist New York
- Burchfield's apocalyptic wallpaper
- Man Ray as Jew, modernist, and exile
- Rape, therapy, and true confessions
- Postcards, Polaroid, and photo albums
- Oil paint, symbol, and secularism
- Site specific as theanyspacewhatever
- From Calder's Circus to abstraction
- Museums as celebrity architecture
- Hysteria, vertigo, and orphans
- Poussin's human landscape
- An installation's hidden New York
- When art attains mythic status
- Saint-Aubin's Rococo graphic novel
- Barcelona, modernity, and others
- Artist as reporter, tourist, or voyeur
- The Renaissance twice over, in diptychs
- Tiepolo, Fragonard, and revolution
- Dada as everyone and no one
- Photography's cultivated environments
- Romantic, modern, or postmodern rebel?
- The studio and gallery take over art
- Fractal Pollock and Rembrandt's eyes
- Browsing Redon and the artist's book
- Street art and graffiti indoors and out
- Struggles for Duccio and Dürer
- How Arbus caught so many looking
- Sussman and Viola make Old Masters
- A Village east of Eden—and Soho
- Raphael the lover and the Mannerist
- A Sephardic Jew in Montparnasse
- From an art fair to "One on One"
- Rothko without the blockbusters
- El Greco's natural and divine light
- Barbizon woods and the Hudson
- Boucher's observation and artifice
- Drawing back from "The Edge"
- Carroll's adventures underground
- Are Stella and Schwitters painting?
- Matisse and Picasso deal with it
- Drawing Leonardo back from myth
- The Renaissance as Expressionism
- A Romantic plays museum politics
- Visions of childhood
- Two Renaissance stylists
- Sargent finds his "true" self
- Pollock's performance—or paint's
- Raimes's imagined translucency
- Art as the construction of memory
- Making Pop look old-fashioned
- Avedon's modern icons
- Coplans up close—and then some
- Nadar the poseur
- Viola as larger than life
- Vermeer's women
- Léger's "humanistic" Cubism
- Rauschenberg's shock of the old
- Facing genius head on
- Reis's forest of old memories
- Jones's empty beds
- Schiele's "shock art"
- Segal's uncanny whiteness
- Local color as personal expression
- Two Renaissance stylists
- Without the trappings of sainthood
- The Renaissance as curator's thesis
- Florence as museum label
- My own little performance piece
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jhaber@haberarts.com
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