Jeff Weinstein

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  print February 1996

  The American Visionary Art Museum

  THE LABELS ARE MOSQUITOES buzzing around a rosy, vulnerable body of work: “alien art,” “batty art,” “self-taught art,” “intuitive art,” “anonymous art,” “obsessive art,” “spontaneous art,” “visionary art,” “prisoner art,” “art brut,” and—watch out, this one’s ready to sting—“outsider art.” Outsider artists, a small group of categorically disadvantaged people, are those who are thought to make outsider art.

  However, if you look at the transhistorical culture of the world and not merely at products of the last few centuries of the museum church-state, you’ll see that it’s really the other way

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  print January 1996

  OLD SOFTIES: CLAES OLDENBURG IN RETROSPECT

  THE CHOCK-FULL, CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED Claes Oldenburg show at the Guggenheim Museum is called an “anthology” instead of a retrospective. Creative titling is an increasingly common tactic of curators, who are understandably weary of having their large but rationally limited one-person shows accused of lack of focus on the one hand and lack of compass on the other. (Artists don’t care anymore what these shows are called, since the ’80s phenomenon of the five-year “retrospective” denatured the very idea of career.) Yet “Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology,” curated by the Guggenheim’s Germano Celant

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  print December 1995

  Jeff Weinstein

  ☝ YEAR OF THE YEAR

  In our parlous and decentralized time, every year fastens on past years it considers worst and best. What was 1995’s most favored vintage? The multifarious judges hand us the envelope, and the winner’s an annoying tie: 1976 and 1937. No secret about the Spirit of ’76: it’s ABBA, using the conduit of Australian pop cult via a trio of wandering drag queens and a Ricki Lake de nos jours to consolidate a long-anticipated phenomenon we are pleased to call “heterosexual camp.” Its signifying image? A worldwide sports cable program celebrating the 100th anniversary of Australian rules