In the 1990 Phoenix Triennial at the Phoenix Art Museum, both technique and subject matter drive home the point that life is serious business. Here you can see a large drawing depicting a child beaten to death. Over there, three headlike shapes, covered in velvet, hang from steel-gallows forms, like…
Art decorates the white-collar walls of many Phoenix business high-rises. Most of it is more decor than art. Given the setting and atmosphere of the modern corporation, it almost has to be low-voltage stuff, drawn from the stocks of interior designers and meant to coordinate with dominant color themes. So,…
Art is where you find it in the dog days of summer. You’ve done the Scottsdale art tours until white wine pours out of your ears. You’ve done the local museums and those galleries still braving the heat. Everybody seems to be gearing up for the fall season or lying…
The art critic Lyn Smallwood wrote, “Finally, there’s a selection of large and cheerfully counterfeit dollar bills painted by Robert Dowd and Phillip Hefferton, of which the less seen the better. Dowd’s `Van Gogh Dollar’ of 1965 was indeed prophetic, but it doesn’t prevent it from being stupid. At its…
Visiting the current exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum is like taking a nostalgic stroll through a supermarket. On display are everything from Ritz cracker boxes and Wrigley gum packets to magazines and newspapers, tourist guides and WPA posters. Coca-Cola packages compose one entire installation–even the ring-top can looks outmoded…
Karen Reinhold is sitting in the office she occupies as director of the Sun Cities Art Museum when one of the women working in the gift shop comes in with a pair of earrings. “She says she’ll take them if we can change them to clips,” the woman tells Reinhold…
Image and exposure are the preoccupations of far too many contemporary artists, and fame and wealth their central goals. From the day they leave art school, young artists can network and dress-for-success as well as any hotshot stockbroker on Wall Street. Gone are the heroic poverty and artistic purism of…
“What a trip,” mumbles a student leaving the upper gallery at Arizona State University’s Nelson Fine Arts Center, and for once, the phrase is entirely appropriate. He has just finished looking at a display of work inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth-century children’s books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the…
Heather Lineberry will be taking over the job of art critic at New Times. She has a master’s degree in twentieth-century art from the University of Texas at Austin, and for the past two years has been involved with a major contemporary gallery in Los Angeles, the Karl Bornstein Gallery…
When four pieces by a single artist can make me question the way I see the entire world, I know I’m seeing terrific art. “Vantage Point,” four installations by Dan Collins at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, is such an exhibition. Part of the show’s pleasure is that it…
Introduction Art lovers were agog last week when thieves made off with twelve works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The haul included a Manet, a couple of Rembrandts and Vermeer’s “Concert,” well-known to all former Art History 101 students. The event set us to thinking. Is all…
William Wegman is wearing the standard uniform for a male artist of the Sixties generation–jeans, tee shirt and tennis shoes–and by his side is the standard accessory for the successful artist from that time–a pretty young brunette. At 46, Wegman has a mop of curly brown hair and a charming…
“I just think that there are lots and lots of ways to make art, and there just aren’t any rules about how to do it. And that anytime somebody tries to make rules about it, it’s a terrible mistake.” Judging from Laurie Anderson’s reputation as an avant-garde artist, you’d expect…
For years, David Markham has had a devotion to Napoleon that some of his friends think is a bit unnatural, and that would have driven to distraction a wife less understanding than Barbara. He wears, for instance, a tie decorated with bees, the French emperor’s symbol. He has traced Napoleon’s…
Meatloaf rolled his wheelchair to the very edge of the stage. “We’ve got to get out of this trap before this decadence saps our wills!” he moaned. Astonished, I watched in helpless silence as the beefy singer stopped just short of plunging over the multicolored footlights and into my lap…
“One stray grain of rice on that slick stage floor, and bang!–you’re on your ass,” frets Bruce Miles. The producer of the Mill Avenue Theatre’s impending live rendition of The Rocky Horror Show, speaking during a recent photo session, confesses he doesn’t know what to expect of the audience when…
Turn your art clock back to the 1920s and 1930s. Yves Tanguy has turned furniture into abstract forms and scattered it over the landscape of time. Max Ernst’s men have sprouted lion heads while Rene Magritte’s tomatoes and apples have grown as big as rooms. Andre Breton has proclaimed “the…
If you knew Tom Oldendick of Phoenix Little Theatre–a flamboyant type who performs a story rather than tells it–you’d be laughing so hard you’d forget for a moment that the three-act comedy he’s replaying almost cost you, the Phoenix taxpayer, a cool half million. He doesn’t spring his story as…
The opening salvo in what ought to develop into quite a lively exchange of gunfire was sounded last week when the first “counter quincentenary celebration” arrived in Phoenix. The quincentenary, as we shall all find out only too well during the next two years, is the celebration of Columbus’ discovery…
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. The best if you were selling tickets; the worst if you were buying them. And now, only one question remains. Will film historians of the future refer to this as “The Heaven’s Gate Decade,” “The Ishtar Decade,” or…
How can land in boring, bland downtown be more valuable than prime sites like the Esplanade at 24th Street and Camelback? Is it just that City Hall doesn’t know how to cut a decent deal? That’s the impression given by the prices the city is paying for land for the…
Before Bruce Willis enters the room, a studio publicist announces that Mr. Willis will not discuss anything pertaining to his ex-TV series, Moonlighting, or his personal life. Hmmm. Okay. So, um, Bruce . . . whaddaya think of those Voyager photos of Neptune? Fortunately, the sole job qualification of studio…
