“As I stood before it on a damp, overcast day,” John Yau recounts his experience with a luminous painting by Edward Zutrau, “I forgot that it was raining.” This is the power of art — halting your world, erasing everything but the profound connection between you and the piece.
Conversely, some art encounters you might wish to erase from memory. Yau also attended Jeff Koons’s exhibition at Gagosian, later critiquing it in a scathing review that promises a good laugh. (Trust an editor, it’s rare for a critique to elicit such amusement.)
Though the world outside remains blanketed in white, perhaps tinged with gray, and conditions may still be too risky for gallery visits, art spaces across the city offer the beautiful, the awful, and the decadent. Until it’s safe to venture out, let our articles transport the external world to you.
If any contemporary artist could benefit from introspection, it might be Jeff Koons. Unfortunately, such reflection is absent in his reflective sculptures, Yau notes, drawing a parallel to Trump’s ostentatious 90,000-square-foot ballroom. Ouch.
