Francesca Woodman, I’m trying my hand at fashion photography (Installation View)

I’m trying my hand at fashion photography is the title of the current Francesca Woodman exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery. Named after one of the many notes the artist inscribed on her photographs, the selection focuses on Woodman’s fashion photographs, a genre the artist worked on during her New York years between 1978 and 1980.  The works are also notable in their oftentimes stark reflection of the final years of the RISD graduate who committed suicide in 1981 following severe depression, possessing elements from her signature photographic style against the backdrop of her own life. (more…)

David Hockney, The Dancers IV. 14 August – 5 September 2014 (2014), via Art Observed

David Hockney’s new exhibition of paintings at Pace Gallery, his first full-size canvases since 2009, are a fitting continuation of the artist’s current interests, combining vaguely abstract environments and poses with a subtly loaded series of juxtapositions. The exhibition, which closes this Saturday, sees Hockney returning from several years focused on landscape studies and experimentations in digital video and photography to portraiture and human subjects. (more…)

As part of its new “Artists Experiment” initiative, The Museum of Modern Art has announced Kenneth Goldsmith as the first “poet laureate” of the museum.  Seeking to bring contemporary artists into dialogue with the institution,the initiative has welcomed Mr. Goldsmith, who also runs the online arts archive Ubuweb, to program a series of readings and events at the museum.  “Poets have this idea that what they do is casual, but the minute you get up onstage anywhere, it’s performative. Poets tend to want to show some degree of “authenticity,” and the structural theatrics around the performative gesture are never questioned. That’s something I always do. I’m a bit of a dandy as a result.”  Goldsmith says. (more…)