"David Hockney 25": The Currency of an Eighty-Seven-Year-Old Painter
Reviewing 'David Hockney 25' at Fondation Louis Vuitton (April–August 2025): iPad drawings in Normandy, empirical observation, and painting at age eighty-seven.
Everyone Became Ghibli: How a Style Became a Filter
Critiquing the viral March 2025 GPT-4o Studio Ghibli visual filter craze: automated pastiche, intellectual property theft, and the flattening of human portraiture.
Christie's "Augmented Intelligence": Artificial Intelligence in the Auction Room
Examining Christie's February–March 2025 'Augmented Intelligence' auction: generative AI, the 6,500-signature artist boycott, and the ambiguous status of digital portraiture.
Jack Vettriano (1951–2025): Scorned by Critics, Beloved by the Public
Remembering Scottish painter Jack Vettriano (1951–2025): 'The Singing Butler', the hostility of the institutional art establishment, and the sociologies of taste.
Walter Robinson (1950–2025): The Critic's Pen, the Painter's Brush
Reflecting on painter and critic Walter Robinson (1950–2025): coining 'Zombie Formalism', the East Village pulp aesthetic, and the double life of the critic-practitioner.
A Room of Her Own for the Mona Lisa: Protecting a Portrait from the Crowd
Analyzing the Louvre's January 2025 'Nouvelle Renaissance' plan to isolate the Mona Lisa in an underground chamber: crowd control, spectacle, and the death of contemplative looking.
Jo Baer (1929–2025): The Painter Who Turned from Minimalism Back to the Figure
Appraising American painter Jo Baer (1929–2025): her 1983 apostasy against formalist abstraction, 'Radical Figuration', and the contested teleology of modernism.
Studios Burned in Altadena: What the Loss of a Painting Takes with It
Reflecting on the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires: the physical destruction of painterly archives in Altadena and the irrecoverable materiality of painting in a digital age.
Cattelan's Banana and the Absence of the Figure: A 6.2 Million Dollar Certificate
Dissecting the $6.2M Sotheby's sale of Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian to Justin Sun: conceptual certificates, radical dematerialization, and the persistence of figurative craft.
Frank Auerbach (1931–2024): A Face Erased Every Morning
Commemorating Frank Auerbach (1931–2024): the ferocious impasto of the School of London, decades of intimacy with a single sitter, and painting as continuous erasure.