Art Criticism in the Age of Blogging

Not to be a “blog snob” but, it seems that Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times in his recent article: "This is Your Brain on Pause" agrees with our opening day (see our earlier posts on 3/12/05 and 3/14/05) assessment of Damien Hirst’s recent show of “paintings” at the Gagosian Gallery. In a word, they are bad; and in the sense that Warhol was “badder” and certainly did it first, Mr. Kimmelman is in agreement with us.
Blogging gets there first, trumping other reports with the immediacy and topicality of the speed of light while the lumbering apparatus of the paper news goes limping into the 21st century like a senescent relative from the old country, barely tolerated by today’s “fresh direct” generation.
Hate to say it, but does anyone under sixty years of age care about “classical” music? If so, they don’t go to concerts and they certainly don’t buy it in the record stores (a quaint notion in itself).
But, back to Damien Hirst, the artist known best for his sculptures, which is his true métier. There is currently a fabulous sculpture by Mr. Hirst at the outdoor concourse beneatht he Lever House at 53rd and Lexington. I call the sculpture “the Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” although it is probably closer to about 40 feet in height, the bronze sculpture depicts a striding pregnant woman with her flesh literally splayed open in the artist’s signature deadpan science-museum expository and explanatory presentation depicting the unborn fetus and the half-shorn skull in anatomical correctness; all of this in such a matter-of-factly “just out for a stroll’ way that passersby, janitors, tourists and myself including are left standing on the sidewalk scratching our collective heads. Now that’s Art, no matter what else you can say, this piece is striking and strident in a fresh and direct way.

, Mr. Hirst's flat-footed pictures, blithely lacking finesse, ignore photorealism's first goals and aspire only to be passingly ghoulish.

And absent invention, they hang there like corpses. They also arrive amid a booming youth market, as shallow and money-obsessed as Mr. Hirst, and just as enamored of fashion, but with a higher premium placed on solo handicraft and earnestness or at least on the appearance of it. Other paintings abound in Chelsea for comparison - not universally good, but generally craftier about the medium, making more of paint's expressive potential and its physical allure. Just up the block from Gagosian, on 24th Street, are shows by Magnus von Plessen, Jules de Balincourt, Martin Kippenberger, Eric Fischl and Gary Hume that at least feature more painterly paintings.

- Michael Kimmelman, NY Times Published: April 3, 2005

Look to this site, "NYC Arts" for a review of Eric Fischels' recent paintings coming soon.

To continue the riff about animation:
Wikipedia History of Animation
Finally a history of animation with links, links and more links.