Chris Ofili's Suave, Stippled, Visually Tricked-out Paintings

I Am All For Art's Finding A Large Audience. But The Way That's Happening Now, With Big Works Filling Big Galleries And Bigger Shows, Is Mostly Stopping Statements From Being Made. Or Heard. Or Talked About. Or Really Examined. It's Watering Things Down.

I See Around 100 Shows A Month, Going From Niketown-size Palaces Where You Feel Like Yelling, To Storefronts In Bushwick. Each Has To Pay The Bills; Keep Artists Happy; And Cope With Collectors (oy!), Curators (ay-yi-yi), Critics (woo-hoo!), And Occasionally Plumbers. That Their Fiscal Life Often Hangs In The Balance Only Adds To The Energy.

In The Late Nineties, Katy Grannan Began Making Haunting Photographs Of People Who Had Extraordinary Inner Yens To Be Seen By Strangers.

When People In Stadiums Do The Wave, It's The Group-mind Collective Organism Spontaneously Organizing Itself To Express An Emotion, Pass Time, And Reflect The Joy Of Seeing The Rhythms Of Many As One, A Visual Rhyming Or Music In Which Everyone Senses Where The Motion Is Going.

It's Great That New York Has Large Spaces For Art. But The Enormous Immaculate Box Has Become A Dated, Even Oppressive Place. Many Of These Spaces Were Designed For Sprawling Installations, Large Paintings, And The Relational Aesthetics Work Of The Past Fifteen Years.