Hydroponic Hot House: The Singapore Bien...

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, March 31, 2011. Arriving a few days ago in this wealthy city-state at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula in order to attend the third Singapore Biennale, I wondered what type of contemporary arts could thrive in a city whose well-earned reputation is one of fabricated perfection and paternal government control. Could unvarnished intellectual explorations into political and economic realities of modern life flower in an environment of unchallenged censorship and...

How Street Art is Taking its Seat at the...

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, February 7, 2011. The website of the Southeastern Centre for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, recently posted a six-minute long time-lapse video of the production of an onsite mural painted by the artist Dalek (James Marshall) and his team of assistants. Created for the exhibition North Carolina New Contemporary, Dalek’s vibrant and kaleidoscopic abstraction of video-game aesthetics slowly assembles in front of the camera lens to the beat of a jazzy...

The Three Ring Miami Art Circus

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, December 7, 2010. I’ve resisted attending the annual art carnival that is Art Basel Miami Beach since my last excursion in 2003. From that trip, during the convention’s second iteration, all I remember is a blur of expensive cars, beautiful women at exclusive parties in boutique South Beach hotels, and an ocean of vodka. (Some figments also remain of a moment when I posed as film director Wes Anderson in order to successfully Jedi mind-trick my way past security into the...

The Artists Who Wield Ideas Like Burning...

By Randy Gladman. Originally published in the Financial Times of London’s How To Spend It, November 4, 2010. Contemporary culture is at its best when it is fresh and stuffed with wide-ranging and original ideas. Many of the most interesting contributors to the current arts have a fierce facility with extreme variety. While many of us get trapped in whirlpools where our bright ideas get replayed until they grow dull, great artists move from idea to idea, their notions adjusting in interesting ways at each pivot point. Sometimes the changes they push are vertical...