Roberta Smith on Cameras

Cameras, writes Roberta Smith, have come to dominate the way we experience art. At every exhibition we go to (in her case, she's writing about the Venice Biennale) we see other people, or ourselves for that matter, seeing the art through the mechanical eye. What does this all mean for art and its future?

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The Village Voice Inteviews The New Museum's Massimiliano Gioni on Ostalgia

The Village Voice's Christian Viveros-Faun interviews the curator of the New Museum's newest exhibition Ostalgia, a show examining art in last twenty years made in the former East bloc. He writes, "The New Museum—running against its previous grain of presenting shows of trophy art and faddishly referential collage—has stepped up to provide this summer's most thoughtfully radical exhibition. Communism, anyone?"

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The New York Times Looks at the Summer's Art in the Streets

From Sol LeWitt at City Hall to the giant bear at the Seagram Building, critic Ken Johnson recaps all of the public art gracing the streets of New York this summer.

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Margarita Aguilar is Named New Director of Museo del Barrio

On September 12, Cuban-born Margarita Aguilar will take over the reigns as director of the Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. The former Latin American Art specialist at Christie's has held this post before, from 1998 to 2006.

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Contemporary Art and Internet Memes

A film still from Interior Semiotics, a video piece by a student at the Art Institute of Chicago that "went viral" on 4chan.com for its "bizarreness"

In his essay in the latest issue of Art Pulse, Domenico Quaranta looks at "What Happens When Contemporary Art Turns into an Internet Meme?" What happens, Quaranta asks, when contemporary art gets out "from the safe niche culture that produces and supports it" and finds itself on the grand stage of the internet? What will this mean for art itself?

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Metropolis Magazine's Paul Goldberger Writes on the Fallacies of "The Architecture of the Future"

This fanciful utopian image appeared second in a list of search results for "The Architecture of the Future" on Google

It's been a cliche in modern architecture from Le Corbusier to Buckminster Fuller to the polemicists of green design--the grandiloquent pretensions of architecture as a discipline for the future. In a witty and intelligent essay, Goldberger points out "What architecture is not designed for the future? All architecture, by its very nature, looks ahead. You don’t build for the past." He suggests that instead of consuming themselves with self-glorifying utopian dreams that are "usually wrong," architectural theorists should instead work to comprehend the architecture of the present.

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"Paradoxically, a lot of people who are held in thrall by fantasy images of futuristic buildings tend to attribute to architecture a power over their lives that they’re almost never willing to grant it in real life." - Paul Goldberger

Kellie Jones on Her New Book: Living and Writing Contemporary Art

Scholar Kellie Jones writes in Art Forum about the ideas behind her new book Living and Writing Contemporary Art. She negated the importance of art education in understanding art. She writes, "that academic routes aren’t the only way to understand art: what it means to you, what artists are doing" is what matters. Is she right in this? Or is this view too optimistic?

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