Adorno: Perennial Fashion-Jazz

"Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows."


Theodor W. Adorno [Perennial Fashion-Jazz, 1953]

Matthew Collings on Tracey Emin's "My Bed"

"What is it? A manufactured saintly relic: the great power it memorializes or stands for is Saint Pain, Saint Class, Saint Gender, Saint Femininity, Saint Abjection, Saint Ethnicity (English mother, Turkish father), and, of course, Saint Victim. Her devil muses are Drunk, Raped, and Can't Spell."

Matthew Collings ["God Save the Queen," Modern Painters, November 2008]

Urs Fischer's "Holes"

"When it comes to installation art, he is prone to an efficient form of spectacle: he simply has very large holes cut or dug in the walls or floors of galleries, museums and the occasional art fair booth, usually to startlingly beautiful effect. Implicitly Duchampian yet marvelously experiential, these pieces have seemed to signal the end of installation art, like monochrome paintings sometimes seem to forewarn the end of painting. Add nothing, just use the space and the architecture, dummy."


Roberta Smith ["Exploration of Space," The New York Times, October 29, 2009]

From a Review of StarTrek

"Jim still manages to defy the continuity team and switch hair from dirty blond to redhead and back again. Don't worry, he's still a natural dickhead underneath."

Anthony Lane, "Highly Illogical," The New Yorker [May 18, 2009].