Ryan McGinness; Art and Entertainment

Relying heavily on a dose of influence from his Pop art predecessors but injecting it with sensibilities based in hip-hop hype, skater style and graffiti guerilla warfare, Ryan McGinness has pioneered a new territory in the realm of high art.

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We have never been terribly superstitious, but the Grand Unveiling of the newly renovated and open-for-business Gladstone Hotel was preceded by some fairly amusing, and somewhat portentous omens. 

The incisive vision of Martin Parr made him totally distinctive in the landscape of contemporary art, and many have been trying to paraphrase his vision. His work is a merciless documentary of everyday life. 

McCaslin’s work treads the ground equally held by installation and sculpture. 

Walking into Ryan Humphrey’s solo show at Caren Golden Fine Art was like walking into Valhalla; a place where the holy relics of my childhood heroes retired for eternity. 

The Sanchez Brothers’ art inhabits that region of the mind visited just before sleep. Things seem quite real — yet are somehow one step removed from reality. 

It’s a Tuesday night in Lower Manhattan. Race night. I’m at Tom Sachs’s production facility on Hester Street, three blocks from his studio, two blocks from his home. Chinatown. This giant factory is on the third floor of an ancient building that once housed the New York City Police Department’s mounted division.

Over the past four years, Torben Giehler’s delirious reworkings of the modernist grid have followed the same trajectory as Mondrian, but their referents – flight simulators, PS2’s stately vector-netted pleasure domes, and the bunker architecture of color-coded Death Stars – is as far from Mondrian’s leaded glass windows, butterfly wings, and cathedral floor plans as a pixel is from a cross. 

Artists from Cindy Sherman to Orlan have explored the chameleon-like nature of female bodies for decades. So what makes Mutu’s work unique? Apart from being skilled in montage she coherently refers to race, politics, fashion, and African identity in portraits that pack an aesthetic punch. 

I caught up with Altmejd for breakfast on the roof of the Armada Hotel in the old Sultanahmet sector of Istanbul the day after the opening of the Biennial. In the shadow of the Blue Mosque with a panorama view of the Bosphorus we spoke about energy generating werewolf heads, studio visits with Matthew Barney, the relationship between art and commerce, and what it means to be a French Canadian artist working in New York City.