Chas Bowie

Beck’s CD Covers–From Tim Hawkinson to Jeremy Blank to Marcel Dzama, Beck is neck and neck with Sonic Youth in bringing important contemporary artists to mainstream visibility. Warhol Graffiti on the Phone Booth at N. Lombard and Denver–The stencil art on the pay phone booth shows the Wigged One glancing nervously at the adjacent KFC, […]

Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes, one of the best art crit blogs on the web (http://www.artsjournal.com/man), recently posed the question: Is macroblogging a city’s visual art scene the future of arts journalism? The blog in question was none other than PORT, a new site dedicated to covering the Portland art scene. PORT was founded […]

I am a Gummi Bear. I am Abe Lincoln, Lisa Simpson, and Sam, friend of Frodo Baggins. I am Berlin-era David Bowie, a high school outsider, and the bubonic plague. And to my greatest chagrin, I am Gollum. I cannot afford to visit a psychiatrist. Instead, I have turned to a more economic method of […]

Jumping the Shark: A designation deriving from a particularly awful episode of Happy Days, “jumping the shark” refers to the moment when something that was once good begins its descent into pure suckiness. Christo and Jeanne-Claude–Let’s start with an easy one. Some people would argue that Christo jumped the shark as he emerged from his […]

There are two general reasons that we love works of art. Either it thrills or dazzles us with stylistic innovation, formal leaps, and buzzing novelty, or it speaks to a deep part of our self, touches our emotional core, and shines light on a completely unironic aspect of our humanity. Sometimes the two phenomena meet […]

Spike Jonze’s Hello Tomorrow On a nearly daily basis, I become increasingly convinced that Spike Jonze may be the coolest–if not the best–artist working today. Although he’ll probably always be described first and foremost as the guy who did the Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage” video and the one for Weezer where they’re jamming with Fonzie and […]

Maybe nobody likes show and tell more than a critic. Writing about art, music, books, theater–anything–is a way of pointing, of saying “here, look at this.” Dave Hickey compared the act to playing air guitar: “flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music. It produces no knowledge, […]

Three (Kinda) Painters Doing Very Cool Things We’re using the term “painter” loosely here–it’s easy to imagine that each of these artists spent a considerable portion of their careers slapping paint onto canvases. But one of them traded the brush for a mouse pad and digital file, another for pen and paper, and lastly, there’s […]

The Three Best Photographers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of Like a camera-wielding Rimbaud from Portland, Daniel Peterson proves that Bohemia isn’t dead, and neither is Boho lifestyle photography. Peterson posts a staggering number of photos nightly to his blog, It Wont Fucking Kill You–shots of birthday parties, urinals, sunsets, clouds of smoke, guitarists, graffiti, and […]