Art News

By Charles Kessler

David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29, November 2006, Oil on 6 canvases, about 72 x 144 inches (Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney. Photo credit - Richard Schmidt).

From Jonathan Jones at the Guardian on the popularity of David Hockney’s exhibition at the Royal Academy: “From Hockney to Downton Abbey: have our cultural tastes gone conservative?”

Via Hyperallergic: The Guggenheim has made 65 of its past exhibition catalogs available free online.

From the Los Angeles Times, an interview with Matthew Marks on the occasion of the opening of a  gallery in L.A.:  “Matthew Marks on lure -- and challenges -- of showing art in L.A.”

Agnes Gund, the classy art patron and former president of the Museum of Modern Art, writes about some potentially hopeful trends for artists: Three movements in particular may provide some relief to our sprawled and underserved population of artists: 1) The growth of local or hometown opportunities for artists; 2) The rise of unexpected exhibition places; and 3) Artist-to-artist initiatives.

And finally, there's this depressing article on our visual environment by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times: There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States. …  One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.” 

Kimmelman goes on to describe ways architects and city planners are beginning to deal with this blight.

A Parking Lot in Disney World,  Orlando Florida