Robert Rauschenberg at Tate Modern

Culture

If art is supposed to reflect the world around us, than the American artist Robert Rauschenberg is an artist par excellence. Rauschenberg was one of the most important artists in the burgeoning, energetic New York art scene of the mid-2oth Century. His ability to gather materials from the dilapidated, grim streets of New York and morphing them into art remains unparalleled, and his influence on the likes of Andy Warhol, who was heavily influenced by Rauschenberg’s silk-screening techniques, is undeniable.

Alexander McQueen: Unseen

Culture, Fashion

This hasn’t been the case with fashion designers until the 2010 suicide of Alexander McQueen. And while you couldn’t exactly sell his artwork at inflated prices, an entire post-mortem cultural industry sprang up around his legacy. This is a testament not so much to McQueen’s unquestionable genius, but to how much more central fashion has become to the contemporary cultural experience. (We did not see such an explosion of media after the murder of Gianni Versace, for example.)

Tomoharu Murakami

Culture

Taka Ishii Gallery New York is tucked neatly away on the third floor of an Upper East Side townhouse. The elevator opens directly into the spare gallery entry where, currently, you will be confronted by a two-foot oil and acrylic monochrome on paper that looks to be made of molten lead. The work is by 78-year old Japanese painter, Tomoharu Murakami, and it is one of ten works comprising what seems to be his second solo presentation to date in New York.

StyleZeitgeist Magazine Holiday Gift Guide, Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonne

Francis Bacon: Catalog Raisonné

Culture

If you are a fan of the Irish painter Francis Bacon, you are in for a serious joy ride (if such a term can be applied to Bacon’s work). Earlier this year his estate released a painstakingly researched and compiled Catalog Raisonné of his work. That’s right – every single Bacon painting known has been searched for, discovered, photographed, described and put into this five-volume cloth bound colossus, distributed in the US by D.A.P.

Sally Mann: Remembered Light

Culture

A deceptively simple show of 46 prints by the photographer Sally Mann are tucked off Madison Avenue in Gagosian’s ground floor galleries and together they present a visually and intellectually sumptuous offering. To read recent commentary on this exhibit before seeing it in person, as I did, would lead one to expect an elegiac, sad, somewhat depressing affair given that the photographs present the Lexington, Virginia studio space of Cy Twobly (a longtime, local friend of Mann’s parents) in the years leading up to his death and also given that one of Mann’s adult-aged children’s unexpectedly died during the preparation of the final prints. Consequently, I went in steeled to a degree.

StyleZeitgeist 10th Anniversary Party Portraits

Culture, Events

Last week we celebrated StyleZeitgeist’s tenth anniversary at Flash Factory in New York City with a live concert by Cold Cave and music by .thejass., Black Asteroid, and Joseph Quartana. In lieu of the usual party shots, we invited the brilliant photographer Dusan Reljin to take some portraits. Wesley Eisold, Eugene Rabkin, Amy Lee Wesley…

Tatsuo Kawaguchi “Land and Sea 1970”

Culture

Taka Ishii Gallery New York published “Land and Sea 1970” to accompany an exhibition by Tatuso Kawaguchi in September 2015. Since that time his book has consistently stood out from the other gallery publications and art books on my bookshelf as being an exceptionally good one. It manages to function not only as documentation of a specific show but, in a sense, is practically a work in its own right. In that regard, we could refer to it as an artist’s book though it was not intended as such.