Anthony Esposito, Accused "Cop-Killer", January 16,1941 Gunman Doesn't Want His Picture Taken. For the first time since Bruno Richard Hauptman, police today permitted photographers in the line-up room at headquarters. The subject was Anthony Esposito, under indictment with his brother, William, for the murder of a business man and a policeman in Tuesday's tragic Battle of Fifth Avenue. The detectives, manacled to Esposito, didn't want their names or picture in the papers. They obliged by turning … [Read more...]
Archives for May 2004
FRED WILSON’S QUEST
Fred Wilson: Mine/Yours, 1995. Collection: Whitney Museum How Objects Get Their Meanings Artist Fred Wilson has worked in various museum education departments: at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Craft Museum, the Whitney. Therefore it may seem only natural that his main subject appears to be museums, and most particularly how museums present, and in doing so either consciously or unintentionally interpret, the objects they put on public display. I have worked in museums too, so of … [Read more...]
JEFF KOONS: POP ART, PART 3
Jeff Koons: Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994-2000. Stainless steel, 10 ft x 12 ft x 45 in. The Pre-New, The New, and the Post-New The secret is out. A classy survey of Jeff Koons' work, covering 25 years of outrageousness at C & M Arts (45 E. 78th St., through June 5), proves that Pop Art never died. Was I the only one to call certain art of the '80s Neo-Pop? That can't be; it's so obvious now when you look at Koons' work that he was doing Pop, and still is. By using the prefix neo, I was probably … [Read more...]
ROBERT INDIANA’S PEACE SIGNS
Robert Indiana, Four Diamond Peace Diamond (2003) The Painted Word Let us imagine for a moment that Pop Art was more important than we thought it was. Taking its cue from, among other things, de Kooning's use of Marilyn Monroe's smile on one of his Women, Rauschenberg's and Johns' use of common imagery (some would count these two, plus Larry Rivers, as Pop), and sources as far afield as Cubist collage and Bruegel, Pop Art is generally defined as the nonpainterly depiction of images from the … [Read more...]