It's often said that art is about asking questions and not about finding answers — that answers are too closed, too limiting, too didactic to make good art. Perhaps it's time to challenge that party line. What's valuable about Zmijewski's video is the way it makes manifest the ugly stuff festering in Polish culture. But it just mirrors and even fosters this these attitudes. It doesn't move anything closer to better. Here in a country mired in two wars and a not-so-great depression, maybe it's time for art to begin mulling solutions.
The ICA's other new show, "Momentum 13," presents photos by the Boston-born, Brooklyn–based Eileen Quinlan through July 12. Also organized by Mergel, it features glam kaleidoscopic shots of mirrors and mylar and slatboard that look like retreads of the fractured lines and planes of early modernist abstraction. To prove her formal point Quinlan might, say, present the same shot twice, but the second time smaller and cropped slightly differently. The shiny surfaces and bright reds and blues are sort of pretty, but her formal explorations are tedious old news.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
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In New England, where you can't swing a sack of cranberries without hitting a venerable cultural institution, anyone with access to a car (or even a subway pass) can scope out these topnotch art museums.
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Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Another Evening: Serenade/The Proposition is an elegant layering of dance, design, music, and words.
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On November 12, the Institute of Contemporary Art opened its biennial Foster Prize exhibit of “Boston-area artists of exceptional promise.”
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"Aggregate" is Maine College of Art's second themed Alumni Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Art, showing work chosen by a jury from among recent work by BFA and MFA graduates. While the artists represent a range of mediums, graduating class ('97 to '08), and experience, the integrity of the selected works is consistently impressive.
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