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April 19th, 2024

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Great, ahem 'art'!

News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

By News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

Published Jan., 27, 2017

Great, ahem 'art'!


New York City sculptor Bryan Zanisnik, operating on a grant from an emerging-artist program of Socrates Sculpture Park in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens, recently created a 10-piece "garden" of concrete Christopher Walken heads to honor the actor, who grew up in Astoria. Said Zanisnik, "Perhaps the project suggests that Walken's DNA was imbued into the soil of Astoria, and now Walken mushrooms are growing everywhere." [New York Post, 10-8-2016]


"To be honest," wrote New York Times art critic Holland Cotter in his lead sentence on Oct. 7, "I wonder what a lot of people see in abstract painting." Then, nevertheless, Carter began praising the current Guggenheim Museum collection by abstract artist Agnes Martin, highlighted by her "Untitled No. 5," which consists of a pinkish horizontal space, on top of a yellowish horizontal space, on top of a bluish horizontal space, exactly repeated underneath except the pinkish and bluish spaces are shortened near the edges of the canvas, but not the yellowish space. Asked Carter, "How do you approach an art empty of ... evident narratives" and "make it your own?" His unrestrained 1,600-word rave did not quite answer that, except to quote Martin's suggestion that the visitor just "sit and look." [New York Times, 10-7-2016]

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