Jenny Saville’s exhibition Ancestors at Gagosian checks off all the boxes of a bad BFA thesis show—sloppy abstraction mixed with sloppy figuration, some “edgy” mutilated figures, a healthy dose of misplaced angst, and a facile conceptual framework. The paintings themselves are superficial, fast, and constructed without conviction. The emotions Saville proposes have no pathos; they instead seem manufactured, with no empathy or intrigue. We have nothing but pure posturing and...

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

by Sophie Bélot. Brill Rodopi 2017. $112.00 hardcover. Also available in e-book. 162 pages.

Reviewed by William J. Simmons

            Catherine Breillat may be one of the most difficult filmmakers to write about with sensitivity, not only because she eschews traditional feminist critiques even as she engages with them...

Does Louise Lawler Make You Cry?

            Louise Lawler’s work has been plagued by totalizing readings about the art market and appropriation. We rely on truisms about the domestication of the art object in Lawler’s photographs of masterpieces in collectors’ homes, and we rehearse a tentatively feminist reading of her critiques of capitalism and male authorship without...

An unpublished review of the latest (and biggest) Wayne Thiebaud monograph that was rejected for being too personal: 

Growing up on a farm outside of Sacramento, I had little hometown pride. California’s capital is little more than a hodgepodge of suburbs with a sprinkling of tall buildings (one of which is so strikingly macabre it is often likened to Darth Vader). A typical Friday evening in my high school days consisted of bouncing around from Tower Theater to Walgreens and Starbucks, inevitably concluding when Round Table, a metonym for the entire...