Ah, the beautiful world of craft art…

Great to dip back into the world of craft art -- or whatever name you want to call first-rate works made in clay, glass, wood, metal,…  At the New York Ceramics and Glass Fair I reconnected with Cliff Lee, a ceramist whose work I had written about in 2010  for American Style.   Five years, I now …

Around the world in 8 galleries

Recently revisited "Interwoven Globe" at the Met and marveled once again at the fabulous designs.  Are these insects, flowers and animals not great? For a more serious take…see my review in the WSJ.

TIBETAN WORKS IN NEWARK

A worthwhile collection of Tibetan art in Newark -- that in itself to most will seem like the ultimate oxymoron.  As one friend wrote to me, "I thought Newark was a cultural wasteland."  Wrong.  At least not within the wall of the Newark Museum where a very dynamic curator has reinstalled the Tibetan galleries, striking …

Chinese cloisonné: just decorative or also art?

Here's the ultimate decorative arts medium -- cloisonné -- and new evidence that Ming Chinese scholar-artists might have prized it the way they did their craggy scholar's rocks and understated ink paintings. The Economist has a great review of a show of cloisonné at the Bard Graduate Center; I also reviewed it in the Wall …

Screening terms

If there is one thing I want you to take away from this show, the curator told an audience of museum members, it is that these works are three-dimensional works, not just paintings. Wow, I thought, here is a curator at an art museum telling people not to look at a work as painting but, …

borderland of art

This is a term New Zealand philosopher of art Dennis Dutton used to refer to  the world of ‘craft art,’ and I love the term.  It reminds me of border regions where people speak two languages and everything from window displays to downtown parades bears the stamp of multiple cultures.   I know border areas in …