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102 Reviews

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  • 83-22 37th Ave
    Jackson Heights, NY 11372
    4.0 star rating
    8/6/2013

    The name says it all. The best $4 margaritas you ever had

    We also got some snacks. I would not recommend this. At $7.95 for one avocados' worth the guacamole was way overpriced and not nearly enough quantity for the huge pile of chips they put on the plate. The chicken quesadilla (also $7.95, for six little wedges) was similar in quality to Applebee's. Just stick to the margs and you'll be good

  • Lorimer Street L Train Station
    Williamsburg, NY 11211
    4.0 star rating
    8/4/2013
    First to Review

    Definitely worth a peek if you've got some time to kill between your transfer from the G to L or vice versa, or at either end of your journey! It sells artists' books, zines, and other paper matter by independent publishers (some DVDs and CDs too). They are organized by publisher rather than thematically so you just have to release your inner browser, dive into a box and see what catches your eye. I picked up an old book of essays on video art and television from 1985, for $12, and a book of "Cell Phone Poems" which was a stack of thick manila sheets cut the size and shape of an iPad mini, or one of those big Samsung tablet phones, and printed with some washed out images and brief poems, held together with a big brass fastener (and a half dozen staples holding its legs down for good measure). The poetry didn't seem amazing but I liked it as an object and at $5 it was hard to pass up. A lot of the other handmade-looking things were in the high end of the single-digits so this thing seemed like a steal by comparison! The people who stop in here look like zine experts (when I went in there was a guy having a long conversation with the clerks, wearing marijuana-leaf printed socks and a snapback) but I think anyone can find something here to their taste if they give a try.

  • 5.0 star rating
    6/29/2013
    First to Review

    A new space for Zwirner right next to the old one with a semi-domestic vibe--the entryway is narrow and carpeted, the door closes so tightly it makes a little sucking noise and you feel hermetically sealed inside, and there are warmly earthy wood and stone materials/colorings. There's a second floor and when I went up the stairs I felt like I might stumble across the master bedroom but no, just the office. I imagine that the buildings Zwirner's clients build for showing off their collections look a lot like this one. The shows i've seen here are all classic stuff--Judd, Flavin, Serra, Blinky Palermo--and it looks good here. Hard to complain!

  • 3.0 star rating
    6/29/2013
    3 check-ins

    One of new York's top galleries. I always like going here. I'd give them five stars but I really did not appreciate their latest show, of new sculptures by Jeff Koons.
    It was very fancy birdbaths--all white plaster casts, each with a mirrored blue orb perched somewhere on it. The suite of sculptures mixed a range of visual references, from a copy of a famous old Hercules statue to a rather plain birdbath to the kind of inflatable snowman you'd see on a front lawn around Christmastime. Koons likes to even everything out--good taste or bad taste, it all ends up as lawn decorations.

    It's the expense that matters. Money is what makes all these things (from various socioeconomic contexts) essentially the same, it's money that gave them the same color and texture. The more money there is, the less difference. The more money you have the less there is that's unavailable to you. Koons's work is about this, and about how it works for him as an artist--how there's no material that can resist his vision because he can do anything with his touch. Like the delicate crinkles along the seams of the inflatable snowman--these are miraculously still visible, but hardened, permanent, and dead when cast in plaster. And the orbs twist the reflection of the people who look into them, everyone becomes a warped bluish shadow. In the twenty-first century the distinction between high and low culture doesn't matter anymore--and why should it?--but Koons keeps shoving it in your face, he likes to remind you that it used to be there, until money made it go away. He likes to remind us of the meaninglessness or arbitrariness of taste. Taste is one of the five senses. Taste is a bodily response, and it's personal--it's each of us gives one or three or five stars in a review. But Koons hoards all the tastes for himself here, as the object of his vision, suffocating taste to death and shutting it away from the rest of us behind the immaculate, unimpeachable finish of his work.

    Kitsch and desire and beauty and bad taste are all important subjects for art--but if you want to see an artist do them well you can just check out any of the three Paul McCarthy who has three shows up right now, in which he outdoes Jeff Koons in all of them. In his work there's life and it resists his vision, it resists the material, and that difference is where he finds art.

  • 32 East 69th Street
    Manhattan, NY 10021
    5.0 star rating
    6/29/2013

    I would give this six stars if I could... the Paul McCarthy show there is beyond amazing. This is art that takes questions of representation and the figure head on, without any abstruse conceptual games but with a lot of spirit and guts--the result is a visceral wrenching experience. [Note: This review contains SPOILERS so don't read it if you're going to go see this Paul McCarthy show (closes July 26)] When you walk in you immediately see a young woman, so still that you know it's a sculpture, but so lifelike you have to make sure it's not breathing. She's on a rectangular pedestal, naked, leaning back on her palms, her legs stretched forward and spread. She has a highly expressive vagina that raspberries the viewer, its pouty outer lips loosely gripping the protruding tongue of the inner ones. There are several copies of her, making it all the more uncanny as you begin to recognizes the traces of craftsmanship and artifice.

    But still when I got to the second floor and saw all the monitors showing footage of the casting process, for a split second I couldn't believe that it wasn't animation. They were so HD that this woman, whom I'd seen sculpted downstairs and now alive and moving--the brightly rendered digital image of her body looked UNreal. I spent a good twenty minutes watching the model as she sat still on the podium, surrounded by fabricators and camera men working quickly to capture her image, both on video and in the mold. She got covered in blue goo and caked in plaster... and in the end they finally cut it all off, and she crawled out of her floppy blue skin like a molting snake.

    Finally, I went back downstairs on my way out... and was stopped in my tracks by the sculptures, which I now saw with totally new eyes. These things that had looked so lifelike to me upon first encounter now seemed pathetically fake. I could clearly see all the imperfections, the rubbery properties of the silicone flesh, all the differences between the mold and the model's HD body. Suddenly the whole thing reeked of death. Shivers down my spine.

  • 5.0 star rating
    6/29/2013
    1 check-in

    Shifting Chelsea's center of gravitas southward, this new gallery features a dramatic entrance--a broad, not-too-steep staircase which when you get to the top ends in a big reveal as you turn left. There it is--the cavernous gallery with vaulted wood beams, lots of natural light, and some really good art! I saw the Paul McCarthy show there. It's big wooden sculptures and drawings based on the artist's twisted vision of Snow White. Everything is warped--you can see Prince Charming on his white stallion, but the figure of him on his horse is split and repeated several times, fused with trees and dwarves, turned back on itself and sliced up into separate pieces, each with a smooth grain of wood that suggested no cut was ever made--that these weird fantasias just emerged into form. Decapitated heads of Snow White herself litter the floor, with blank, pupil-less eyes and a whorish hole of a mouth--actually not a hole but a divot with a rounded bottom, the right size to hold an apple, whole and unchewed. Here too the polish factor on the wood is very high, but the shallow oral cavity suggests a digging into the surface by a wood carver, without the possibility of penetration or a real inside. The imagination is twisted and broken up into pieces but each fragment emerges into being as if whole.  

    All around, this is a great gallery to visit. I didn't interact with the staff directly but overheard them talking and they seemed nice--one of the desk girls was so nice she even expained scallion cream cheese to her coworker. She told her about how an onion-like bulb has green shoots that get cut up and mixed with cheese. First week in new York honey?

  • 4.0 star rating
    6/29/2013

    If you want to chill hard in Chelsea this summer head to Tanya Bonakdar!! Every gallery is going to be air conditioned of course but the back room of "ambient," a group exhibition on view until the end of July, is a dark icebox with a soothing projection by Seth Price--an ocean of digital swells, black and tinged at the crests of their ripples with all the thousands of hues of the Photoshop gradient rainbow. They roll and roll, an endless and endless moving surface--slightly unnerving but not enough to interrupt a relaxed contemplative mood, especially when there are comfy armchairs set up for viewing, with little end tables next to them (bring an ice coffee to put on them, ha). The rest of the show is pretty good as well.

  • 33 Garden Rd
    Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
    4.0 star rating
    6/29/2013

    A lovely museum in a bucolic setting. Hessel makes a great stop on a day trip from the city, easy to combine with visits to DIA Beacon or the Storm King sculpture park if you've got a car. If not--then you can't do them all in one day, but be advised that the Hessel runs complimentary shuttles from Manhattan when they have openings. Beer, wine, soft drinks and pretzels at the opening are complimentary as well.

    All in all, a great place. But couldn't give it five stars because I'm not into the new shows. One is Haim Steinbach, an artist who never really got my juices running. His work is about shelving, display, minimalist art, the museum retail, etc.--a kind of third-wave pop/appropriation art (if you just read that and you were like "so what?" you feel me). What makes this show interesting--perhaps more so than others of his that I've seen--is what he did with the Hessel's permanent collection. A cool thing about the Hessel is that it's endowed with a small collection of important works of contemporary art but rather than put them up in the standard museum display they let invited artists and curators incorporate them in their shows, using unconventional and experimental display methods, the likes of which you would never see in your run-of-the-mill museum. Steinbach put up this construction-site scaffolding in the big gallery and arranged works above and below it, so you could glimpse the pieces (both museum works, Steinbach's own stuff, design objects, knickknacks etc.) in horizontal and vertical layers, that made you think about the status of each thing as an object or artwork.

    The other exhibition was Helen Marten, a young British artist. It was a smart pairing with Steinbach, though I like her work even less. It's also about objects and display, and coming up with quirky convoluted relations between things. Everything is about weight, balance, and borders, and everything is solid and in tension. There are papery woodcuts that look flimsy but hold up to the weight of loaded key rings hanging off of them, for instance. The paintings have stuff attached to the bottom of the frames, so they don't end with the canvas. It's about surfaces and repetition, too--there are cans of olive oil positioned on the floor around the galleries, and the olives and vines from the logo are repeated on the wall--yet nowhere in the show do you find the mess of the oil itself. This is also true in her videos. Digital media can be slippery, glitchy, pixelly, liquid--but when Helen Marten gets her hands on it she makes everything robust and shiny and glossy, crafting digits into beautiful perfect objects, just as hard and solid as the commodities she appropriates in her sculptures. Yawn.

    Great museum though!

  • 5.0 star rating
    6/25/2013
    First to Review

    I had never heard of this gallery before but several people told me that the Albert York show there was a must-see and so I went to check it out. I hardly even ever go to galleries on the Upper East Side but maybe I should do it more because being situated in townhouses they tend to have a very relaxed, homie vibe, that the big boxes in Chelsea lack. This is especially true at Davis & Langdale where the floors are a dark and uneven old parquet, and when you go to the basement to see the second half of the exhibition there's a door open into the workshop, revealing a wall hung with frames--the heart of the operation, exposed! When I was there a little boy was drawing in his sketchbook, and the elderly people who run the gallery were walking around the space and talking about the show ("These paintings are hung low, aren't they?" "It's a little late for that") and even though they weren't related I felt as if I'd walked in on a family gathering. As for the exhibition the paintings were incredibly delicious. Albert York used very forceful physical brushstrokes to make simple, fresh, compositions and there's a satisfying tension to how it all comes together... you can see how the paint was applied and it looks like the painter added paint from the outside as the image itself emerged from within--from within the paint or the surface or the painter's imagination (which is organically fused with the surface), I don't know, but it's amazing. Amazing! For example, there's one landscape with a long brown snake slithering along the bottom. It's just a green space with some ordinary deciduous trees, not a jungle where you would expect to see a huge snake, and yet there the snake is, its sinewy curves looking right at home in their natural habitat of S-curve brushstrokes. In another painting a cartoonish, scribbled-in alligator grins out at you from under a patch of bushes. I can't remember the last time I felt really excited about a still life with flowers but in York's floral paintings each petal is every bit as surprising as an alligator or a snake. Unfortunately this show will be closing soon but I plan to follow up and see what this gallery is showing in the future.

  • 3.0 star rating
    6/2/2013

    The Guggenheim is the best museum in New York to go to on a date. If you go to the Met then your date will want to look at the Egyptian galleries whereas you want to look at Dutch painting, or whatever, and eventually you'll reach a compromise that you both secretly resent. Same at MoMA and any other museum that has a diverse array of exhibits to see. The Guggenheim is good for a date because it doesn't give you a choice. There's nowhere to go but up the ramp. Of course, there's the Tannhauser galleries on the side, but you can always stop in those on the way back down (if you really need to see Kandinsky AGAIN). This is also good for tourists. Tourists don't care about art, they just want to visit a museum and feel like they've achieved something by visiting it, and the feeling of walking to the apex of a spiral ramp is a great simulation of achievement. That's why whenever you go to the Guggenheim pretty much everyone you see is either a couple on a date or tourists.

    As for looking at art the Guggenheim is not so great. Everything is on a slant, the galleries are chopped up into little rectangular alcoves, there's the dull roar of everything that happens in the atrium echoing as permanent background noise, you feel like you're on the world's longest treadmill. The only way art looks good here is if it somehow takes the shape of the museum into account and responds to it. I'm not a big fan of Maurizio Cattelan but his retrospective here, where he hung all the sculptures from the roof so that as you went up the ramp you would see themes and imagery developing in his work over time, and get several various perspectives on them, was really brilliant. Also the Tino Sehgal piece where nothing was hung in the museum and you would just talk to people of increasing age as you went to the top was a great response to the physical feeling of progress you get from walking up the ramp--makes you wonder what "progress" really is in history or in life.

    That said, I've seen some more conventional exhibitions at the Guggenheim that were really well put together and I learned a ton from them--the Richard Prince retrospective in 2008 and the recent Gutai show are two stand-outs for me. Even if the space wasn't so flattering to these exhibitions I appreciated the chance to see them.

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