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Sleet spattered over VIPs queuing outside for the opening of the Whitney Biennial on February 23rd. We suffered in silence, in darkness, our conversations drowned by the monastic groaning of an outdoor installation that cast an eerie blue hue. Dumpling trucks prowled and rogue cameramen interviewed some on a scrap of red carpet. We inched along as the storm intensified, sentries sifting us into various purgatories.

Once inside, past menacing squads of security officers and Blackberry-wielding event planners, we were rewarded with heat, light, DJed electronica, crowds, food, wine and, eventually, art. We began our tallying for our respective cost-benefit analyses: was it worth the wait?

The Biennial spans three floors—more when counting "Collecting Biennials", a nearly year-long show of permanent-collection works by artists featured in Biennials past, in celebration of the show’s 75th year. Francesco Bonami, this year’s co-curator, broke it down for us: floor four is “spectacle”, three is “video” (the first Biennial to devote an entire floor to the medium) and two is “creepy”. We are meant to choose our own path, but the most convenient approach is to take the elevator to the fourth floor and walk down.  read more »

Every image is essentially an illusion—a representation of a thing, never the thing itself. For many artists the illusion is itself the art. From early trompe l’oeil paintings to Juan Munoz's close-up photographs of sleight-of-hand card tricks, artists have long shown an affinity for the ploys of grandstanding stage magicians.

"Magic Show", a newly published catalogue to accompany a travelling exhibition of the same name, explores the relationship between art and magic. Written by Jonathan Allen and Sally O'Reilly, who co-curated the show for London's Hayward Gallery, the book discerns the connection between "lowbrow" trickery and loftier manipulations.

Many of the 24 contemporary artists featured (in both the show and the book) borrow directly from iconic magic tricks. Sinta Werner's "Disjunction" plays on the idea of a disappearing act, but in this case it is the viewer who vanishes; the site-specific installation creates the effect of approaching a mirror without a reflection. Susan Hiller's "Homage to Yves Klein" is a more upbeat take on his rather dark photo-montage, "Leap into the Void" (1960). The result is a charming play on the trick of levitation.  read more »

Does size matter? For Shaquille O’Neal his very existence offers a larger-than-life answer to that question. Standing at 7’1”, weighing 320 pounds and strutting about in size 22 shoes, Shaq casts a long shadow. His appetites and ambitions are similarly colossal: a professional basketball star, he has also worked as an actor, rapper, memoirist and reserve police officer, and is now working on a PhD in organisational behaviour. Now, thanks to the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, Shaq can cross another item off his to-do list: curate an art show. “Size DOES Matter” features 66 works chosen by the man himself, and a catalogue with an essay by James Frey (yes, that James Frey).

An outsized gimmick? Perhaps. The line to attend the show's opening on February 19th snaked outside for nearly a block. And Shaq's selections, which feature a range of contemporary works of varying, eye-teasing sizes, were plucked from more than 200 images supplied by FLAG's founder, Glenn Fuhrman, and director, Stephanie Roach, over dinner after a game. Still, this playful show holds up as a satisfying examination of size and scale in art.

The works are by 43 artists, including Elizabeth Peyton, Cindy Sherman, Ron Mueck and Richard Phillips. Quite a few of them send viewers through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. Robert Therrien’s "No Title (Table and Six Chairs)" from 2003 achieves this most dramatically. The installation is so big that visitors are granted the perspective of children, peering up at the seats with curiosity about the grown-up world “up there”.  read more »

Tony Candido's resume includes a roster of legendary mentors. After studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, he worked as an architectural designer for I.M. Pei and contributed to Konrad Wachsmann's groundbreaking Air Force airport hangar design.

But Candido has also pursued his own vision. He began painting professionally in the early 1950s, using sweeping brush strokes to create abstract explorations (as with "Night Paintings", from 1956), figural studies ("Asahikawa Heads", in 1988) and conceptual, architecturally driven works, such as his continuing "Cable Cities" series (pictured), which depicts structures embedded in the landscape.

Now aged 85, Candido paints regularly and teaches at Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Students in his studio class tackle the idea of the urban farm, a concept Candido pioneered in the 1990s that intersects ideas of farming, architecture and urban planning. This month Cooper Union has mounted "The Great White Whale is Black", a retrospective exhibition honouring five decades of Candido's work. The day the show opened Candido took a moment to speak with More Intelligent Life about his approach to painting, his fascination with spatial relationships and the relationship between cities and their surroundings.

More Intelligent Life: You've worked with some huge names in the architecture world, including Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei. Did either of them influence you as an artist?  read more »

I’m standing at the entrance to a diminutive, seemingly forgotten salon tucked away in a corner of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The corridor just outside, decked with oil paintings of stern-faced founding fathers, hardly prepares me for the gleaming kitsch beyond the threshold. It is January 8th 2010 and the museum has just unveiled “One Life: Echoes of Elvis”, an exhibition celebrating the man’s lasting impact on art and culture. Elvis Presley would have turned 75 today, and I have come to celebrate his birthday. I am the only one here.

The exhibition is miniature, composed of only a handful of Elvis portraits and memorabilia. And yet: where is the fanfare? Absent are the mutton-chops sporting über-fans, with their inky slicked-back pompadours and sequined white jumpsuits. It’s just me, my notepad and a massive, golden bust of Elvis rendered like he is Julius Caesar.

The bust forces a double-take. Created by Robert Arneson, this dazzling ceramic sculpture with a gold-tone glaze seems to satirise Elvis’s larger-than-life presence and the reverence he inspires in his admirers. Beneath his signature smirk, this Elvis wears a breastplate adorned with the image of a winged guitar and stamped with song titles. Underneath, a pedestal bears the word “ELVIS” in classical Hellenic lettering—and, less ornately, “THE PELVIS”.  read more »

In an inspired move, our colleagues over at Democracy in America, The Economist's American politics blog, compared President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech to the work being done over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they are trying to repair a Picasso painting that was ripped by a clumsy visitor. It's hard to restore broken masterpieces, just like it is hard to restore the promised glory of Obama's presidency, now that it has been tainted by the nasty work of governing.

The president has been in a tight spot—the kind of place he tends to emerge from, Houdini-like, with some masterful speechifying. But this has proven much harder in office, where the nitty-gritty of policy must inevitably displace the beauty of promises. So instead of dazzling us once again with skilful oratory, he delivered a speech that has been generally derided as ho-hum: smart, pragmatic, overlong and unstirring, bogged down in numbers and wonk.

Were we entitled to expect otherwise? How can a president both make decisions and rise above their messiness? Isn't this what we complained George Bush did with his insidious "War on Terror" narrative? Junot Diaz put his finger on this visceral, childish yearning for a good story in the New Yorker:  read more »

The Whitney Biennial is something of a coming-out party for mostly young and mostly unknown contemporary artists working in America. To announce the much-anticipated list of artists selected for this year's show, which opens in New York on February 25th, the two curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, have supplemented the traditional press release with a short, weird film. Art wags are now scratching their heads, wondering what this could possibly mean.

“Whitney Biennial: The List” features a cherubic Carrion-Murayari and bewhiskered Bonami bellowing their 44 picks while being shot at extreme angles in odd locations around an unusually monochromatic Whitney Museum of American Art. Meanwhile, the artists’ names scroll by below, replete with exclamation marks! Is this a call to arms? An attempt to infect the tweet-set on the cheap? Puerile inside baseball on par with the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rickroll?  read more »

“Who Shot Rock & Roll?”, asks a show at the Brooklyn Museum. It’s not a bad question. You’d have to be something of a specialist to have heard of most of the photographers on display in this "Photographic History, 1955 to the Present". Yes, there’s a rather nice snap by Linda McCartney of her husband’s eyes in a rear-view mirror. But unlike most museum portraits, these are mainly pictures of people we know made by people we don’t.
 
The show suffers little for that. It includes some iconic shots, many of which became album covers: the nude girls climbing a rockpile that got Led Zeppelin’s "Houses of the Holy" banned in Oklahoma and Spain; Paul Simonon of the Clash swinging his bass down towards the floor like a man furiously splitting logs–the image of rock rage that would front "London Calling".
 
But it is actually the lesser-known pictures that make "Who Shot Rock" worth the trip. Elvis Presley, so young he looks like he would have trouble growing a beard, nonchalantly lunches with a friend at a diner shortly before astronomical fame would make such a scene impossible. A long-haired Michael Stipe of REM grins for the camera from ear to ear–something he doesn’t seem to do much anymore–as he eats with bandmates at a barbecue joint. Bob Dylan, tribune of the people, looks vacant and unconcerned in his car as the faces of fans press desperately against the glass outside.  
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Gabriella Gómez-Mont always feels a twinge of panic when she has to fill out her profession on immigration cards at various far-flung airports. The dynamic Mexican founder of Tóxico Cultura, an experimental creative lab, and a TED senior fellow, she is also a writer, photographer, visual artist and cultural entrepreneur–not exactly an easy title to put in a box.

Unsurprisingly, Gómez-Mont is fascinated by the intersections of different disciplines, creative and otherwise. This motivated her to create Tóxico Cultura in Mexico City four years ago, which functions as a kind of multidisciplinary think-tank. Artists, filmmakers, photographers and writers come here to discuss and present their work amid cultural workshops, lectures, exhibitions and film screenings. The city's creative types have all heard of Tóxico, and everyone wants to be a part of it.

Committed to reviving what she calls Mexico’s “cultural legacy”, Gómez-Mont is embarking on even more ambitious adventures. Bubbly and passionate, she gushes enthusiastically about filming her first documentary (about a reclusive Mexican scientist and artist), and about her creative approaches to social-justice problems. Here she talks to More Intelligent Life about Tóxico Cultura's mission, her interest in outsider artists and the impact of TED on her creative thinking.

More Intelligent Life: How would you describe what Tóxico Cultura does?  read more »

In November Art Review magazine named Hans Ulrich Obrist the number-one most influential person in the art world. But according to Obrist, the excitement hasn’t interrupted activities at London’s Serpentine Gallery, where he is co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects. For decades, Obrist has authored analytical commentaries on contemporary art, while simultaneously redefining its presentation at renowned institutions such as the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Obrist also conducts interviews. In the past few years he has released two 1,000-page volumes of his collected conversations with the most talented artists, architects, scientists, engineers and thinkers living today. Most recently he interviewed Jeff Koons for the artist's new book "Hulk Elvis", which features works from the series of the same name. 

It could be intimidating to interview someone with a C.V. like Obrist's, but the man at the other end of the telephone line is disarming and reassuringly self-possessed. He draws his interlocutor into a cocoon of seemingly all-encompassing knowledge about everything involving aesthetics. Obrist speaks incredibly fast, and crams in so many snippets of insight that it would be impossible to relay them all in one pass. Here we present the highlights, including his thoughts on the trouble with meetings, the world's most exciting new art scene and why it is vital to consider posterity.

More Intelligent Life: What did you eat for breakfast this morning?  read more »