For artcritical.com, a milestone and a significant appointment. The former has been trumpeted for a while in our newsletters but the giddy sense of achievement is yet to rub off: the tenth anniversary of The Review Panel. (The podcast from last month’s season premiere is now available, by the way.) Friday, October 24 sees three veteran guests joining moderator and artcritical editor David Cohen at the National Academy: Ken Johnson (who appeared on the first panel), Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish. Discussion includes the popular David Hockney show at Pace, which in combination with cast and occasion caution the wisdom of an RSVP: 212 369 4880 x201 or here.
As for the appointment, this is of our new Poetry Editor, Michael Heller, whose Desmoiselles d’Avignon-inspired collaboration with the Colorado artist duo alpert+kahn, Dda, has just been posted in our Poetry for Art series. As a past luminary of that series, Anne Waldman (in collaboration with Pat Steir) has written, “Michael Heller is one of our best poets and thinkers who has carried Oppen’s dictum that poetry embodies ‘precise information on existence’ forward.” Heller’s collected poems, This Constellation is a Name, which was published in 2012 by Nightboat Books, is as rich with connections to the world and thought of painters from Kitaj and Kossoff to Tiepolo and Mondrian and Beckmann as it is mystics and dandies from Baudelaire to Benjamin to Tibet. He replaces our long serving first advisor in poet-artist collaborations Bill Berkson who does us the honor of joining our roster of contributing editors.
Meanwhile, associate editor Noah Dillon writes this week on Israeli-born painter of lobsters and sensualities Tomer Aluf in a review that is almost a Baudelairean portrait of an artist dandy. Lindsay Comstock, continuing the sartorial theme, offers a very personal meditation of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute exhibition, Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire. Roman Kalinovski, in his first review for artcritical, looks at the monograph on Richard Phillips from Rizzoli. Deven Golden writes on the painter William Conger whose abstraction shadowed the Imagists and helped define a Chicago style. David Rhodes writes on Kate Shepherd and Ellie Bronson on Do Ho Suh’s drawings. Apropos The Review Panel’s upcoming deliberations, Juliet Helmke visits a group show about drones and photography at Apex that includes the work of Peter Fend.
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