A review of a second book that is about the writing of a first book on Francis Bacon. Sometimes the art is in that which survives the transcription into history.

An excellent interview regarding a great late Barnett Newman exhibition.

Ralph Rugoff comes off as a deflecting pedant when talking about his 2015 Lyon Bienniale but the shift in taboo word of "modern" is interesting. Rugoff is a practiced contrarian when it comes to language and these festival shows are frequently intellectually capricious. In many ways he is a very right way to strip Alfred Barr's progressional timeline from what should be a very common and useful word "modern". All the School of Paris artists were trying to do is something current and yes "Modern". They didn't form salons devoted to "Modernism"... that was bill of goods the world was sold after the fall of fascist regimes involved in WWII. That's why the swipes at modernism and an attempt to rehabilitate the term is a bit of a straw man arguement.

Hyperallergic looks at writing art criticism. We at PORT see criticism as an experimental form that actually prioritizes challenging communication that embodies the challenge of communicating something about the challenge ...whew. And no academic diplo-dialects that never take a stance aren't so much criticism as career opportunities in masquerading as codes for consensus. Criticism comes from the Greek word Krisis it is supposed to engender a kind of rupture between judgement and argument. Anything else is more of an advertisement or politics and true criticism is neither... it is a kind of world view that doesn't seek to create consensus, merely understanding. It is a very subtle distinction that one almost never gets from newspaper-level writing.