Houston Artletter

Second only to Halloween as an art-saturated holiday, the end of each year is an orgy of group gift shows, holiday decorating events, and year-end pleas from nonprofits happy to…

With demand dropping for dull piety in art, contemporary artists have left the Nativity, the Annunciation, etc. to popular illustrators, and have rallied around Halloween as the new iconographic nexus.…

This piece, just to the right of the door (I always work counterclockwise) was the first thing I looked at at the London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery, and the…

Popped into the Oxford Modern Art Museum to see some of Jenny Saville’s paintings in person- they’re based on photographs, so in reproduction you miss her somewhat annoyingly self-conscious painterly…

183 pieces in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s  collection are now online in intimate detail as part of Google’s expanded Arts Project.  With the Google-powered ability to zoom in…

One pitfall of installing dreck on your campus is that future webmasters may feature it online, unwittingly delivering backhanded insults to your university’s programs.

I sympathize with Chris Jagers’ dismay at the renewed assertion of language at the primary, superior carrier of meaning in his blog next door, but don’t get too worried. It’s…

The key to provincialism is the belief that something happening somewhere else is more important than what is happening right before one’s eyes. Since the people you know and the…

Let’s start with the Tolerance bridge thing I just posted on the newswire: why a new name? Is HAA trying to increase community involvement in a project that is essentially…

All right, I’ve got to do another blog about the whole Wayne Dolcefino undercover Eyewitness News 13 thing. First the apologies: I suppose Dolcefino’s got space to fill, and his…

Wayne Dolcefino’s expose of the misuse of Houston Arts Alliance money kicked off last night  on KTRK’s 10 O’clock news with a lot of frothing at the mouth: a brief…

Forget the west coast, let’s eat it now!

Dan Fabian spent the summer drawing, and drawing, and drawing. Apama Mackey’s containerized art gallery on the 11th St. art corridor is crowded with 37 witty pages that balance obtuse…

OK, everybody has hurricane pictures, but not everyone has a blog to post them on, so here goes: Paul Kittelson’s show at NauHaus included these fake broken and boarded windows.…

The Damien Hirst direct auction at Sotheby’s is double interesting because people hate art dealers, AND they hate superstars. You can enjoy it two ways: either "Hirst is really sticking…

The Damien Hirst direct auction at Sotheby’s is double interesting because people hate art dealers, AND they hate superstars. You can enjoy it two ways: either "Hirst is really sticking…

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an article by Nicolai Ouroussoff that decried the pragmatism of today’s architects, wistfully longing for more dreaming and less building.…

I saw the Big Show at Lawndale weeks ago, when it first opened. I took a lot of photos, and picked these as my favorites. I’m afraid I’ve lost my…

August is the month to get away from Houston’s heat, and this year, as usual, I visited family in the UK, with a side trip to the southern France for espadrilles and…

I won the Yankee Candle Company pumpkin-carving contest in 1989. I was in grad school. It was a break from deconstructing the political subtext of my "real" work. I had…