contemporary art

Zachary Heinzerling’s debut documentary about Japanese artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara is a film that astonishes viewers not because Ushio and Noriko are wonderful artists—and they are—so much as because they’ve managed to stay married to one another.  Forty years ago, a beautiful young woman came to America to study art and met Ushio, a hell-raising iconoclast who gained a bit of fame as a performance artist.  Noriko fell in love.  

Life with Ushio isn’t easy for Noriko—he drinks, doesn’t sell much artwork—but it is stimulating. She suffers, citing her husband (while sitting next to him!)

What Are You Looking At? is an unusual art history book dealing only with art of the last century, with the focus on the 1980s, “the age when wealth and vanity corrupted Western civilization,” to a little leaner present.  The inside book covers contain a detailed map, which resembles the London tube map, of all obscure genres and movements, some of them little known.  The author’s approachable writing shows a correlation between various art movements and the historical and cultural movements happening simultaneously. The book describes the dynamics of marketing and selling in primary and