Consider: Wishing Well looks like a clear, plastic bucket with a penny magically floating in water above change on the bottom. The pail is actually hand-blown glass. The coins are painted plastic and the water is silicone. The trick of the floating penny diverts your attention from the real magic: that the whole thing is exquisitely crafted to look like a mop bucket.
>> SLIDESHOW: "More Is More" + "Everything Is Coming Up Roses" <<
Zane's satires are often limited to art about art, but as our country suffers through loser wars and an economic bust, his funny/sad study of failure could fry bigger fish. The jokes cut more deeply when he seems to do just that in his dream of magic money in the bottom of a mop bucket.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Related:
Photos: RISD’s 2010 Annual Graduate Thesis Exhibition, The year in Portland's art scene, Reimagining Porgy and Bess, More 
- Photos: RISD’s 2010 Annual Graduate Thesis Exhibition
Prominent installations in this year’s showcase at the Rhode Island Convention Center.
- The year in Portland's art scene
For lovers of spectacle, 2010 offered a lot of feasts. A fine collection of installations and site-specific works graced the greater city in 2010, challenging our perceptions and changing our surroundings.
- Reimagining Porgy and Bess
In the new production at the American Repertory Theater, directed by Diane Paulus, Messrs. Heyward and Gershwin have been reworked by two actual African-Americans: two-time Obie Award winner Diedre L. Murray and Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
- Pulp art at the Brooks School
A tank with a giant drill on the front erupts from under the street of a burning city.
- The MCC Awards at Tufts, 'Flourish' at MassArt, and 'The Cave Project'
On the whole, I wish many of these 13 grant winners were more exciting. The art often feels conservative or academic. Even when the craft is impressive, the artists often seem to have little they care about and little to say.
- Catherine Opie and 'The Record' at the ICA
Catherine Opie first became known in the early '90s for blunt lesbian self-portraits and posed photos of the queer community.
- The Boston Cyberarts Fest needs a reboot
It's a quiet morning along the Rose Kennedy Greenway when I meet Mark Skwarek — a shaggy-haired New Yorker in a Spider-Man T-shirt and Puma sneakers — to check out his latest project, Occupation Forces.
- RISD's 'Cocktail Culture' offers an intoxicating history of 20th-century fashion
Across the country, on January 16, 1920, citizens drank up at liquor "wakes" before the 18th Amendment, ratified a year before, went into effect at midnight, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of "intoxicating liquors."
- Bringing the noise at Brown
Remember when you were just a little tyke and you considered banging Lincoln Logs on the heads of Gobots music to your ears?
- Review: Iain Kerr examines truth, reality, and the human way
Confronting and denying conventional aesthetics and modes of exhibition, Iain Kerr: artist, writer, educator, and founding member of spurse, an international peripatetic collective and experimental consultation service, intimately reinvents the project space at Gallery 37-A.
- Review: Alan Metnick at Gallery Z; and 'The Magic Child Repository'
Providence artist Alan Metnick's black-and-white India ink drawings look as if they could have been made by obsessive children, with their buzzing patterns of buildings and trees and snaking tunnels.
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Museum And Gallery
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