Barry Kostrinsky - Page 3

Bruce Sherman's drawings evolve and flow; as he breathes it breathes. This may sound like child play but it takes a quiet mind to open up to a free unguided hand,. Remember that Picasso quote, “ It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Sherman's clay work has an organic feel. The forms seem to be almost happening as if they were created softly, developed by a soft hand reaching for the form to reveal itself and not to be ordered and directed. The material is often slab left overs, remnant rogue clay not fashioned for play this way or that, a gap in the note, a space for the music.

Some of the best ways to collect art at reasonable prices is to make a habit of going to the many art sales aimed at benefitting an important arts organization. Usually these sales bring together a group of artists around the organization that are vested in the organization, the area or the scene. This Monday July 22 from 5-9pm you can sip some wine, have an hors d-oeuvre or two and meet and see works by some 50 artists that have congealed around the BRONXARTSSPACE.

Michael Jordan is arguable one of the best basketball players of all time. His foray into baseball hardly puts him in the list of the top 10,000 baseball players of the past decade. Jay-Z is one of the greatest rappers of our time. Is he gonna play basketball too? No, but he has a found a loophole into the art world.

I can see going to Venice for the food, for Lido's beaches and for the Gondolas. Heck, I'd go to the Jersey shore for two of the three. Why would you go to Venice for Contemporary art? The 55th Venice Biennale opened on June 1 and runs through November 24th; 88 countries have pavilions including the Vatican in this art world equivalent of the world cup for soccer socialites. Is it worth the trip, who can afford to treck the art trade show route and what's it all about-Alfie?

'To hand make a mass-produced item is so stupid it's smart. It's a transformation. It doesn't work if it's not real size. It convinces you. In the surreal world, anything happens but there's a logic to it. ' Timothy Blum.

As I prepared to go to the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia for the first time I was eager. Eager to see how Dr. Barnes mixed art and object, to see brilliant Cezannes, Van Goghs, Matisses, Renoirs, Picassos- you know the heavy weights of the old avante-garde that laid the road to modernism for all the good and bad turns to come by drivers like Duchamp, Pollack, and Warhol.

Whitney Museum's DeFeo Exhibit

Stop reading, leave the house and head to Frieze on Randall's Island. The art world is waiting outside your door across the river on that other island you never go to. The fair is that good, that diverse and that much of an international art extravaganza that it is that simple- get there!

Annina Nosei once told me it is a great idea to open an art gallery across from a major Museum. Larry Gagosian's uptown gallery on Madison Avenue is a block from the Whitney. No doubt his intent was to be in the shadow of the Whitney or to cast his shadow on the Whitney- you be the judge. Down the avenue at 218 Madison Avenue in Suite 4c is Rob Teeter's Front Desk Apparatus across from the Morgan Library.