Quoted: For the past year or so I’ve become increasingly aware of a kind of provisionality within the practice of painting. I first noticed it pervading the canvases of Raoul De Keyser, Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Mary Heilmann and Michael Krebber, artists who have long made works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling. In different ways, they all deliberately turn away from “strong” painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.

whoa! art history entertainment gossip!

Quoted: "We all knew that was going to end, but we weren't expecting it right now," he says

Quoted: This refreshed attention to modernism’s potentials might be considered a classic generational response to a bequest of obsolete tools. Though increasingly prevalent in recent exhibitions – the Berlin Biennial, for example, which pointedly sited its contents in modernist venues – it has been swelling for some time.

art institute peeps, you may ditch the modernist guilt now

Quoted: It’s August 2007, and I’m outside an east London gallery at a rare summer opening. I talk to Nicolas Bourriaud and am struck by how unconcerned he is about the ongoing circus of critical reflections around his writing on 1990s relational practice. Bourriaud is researching the third Tate Triennial; extending his research, he speaks of an interest in migration linked to ideas around disconnected, dispossessed and transient lives without roots: a journeyform drawn in space and time.

Quoted: So what happened to art and how did its commodification become so blatant? Eric Fischl told me that a woman once asked him the difference between the art world in the ‘80s and now. “I’ll tell you the difference”, he said “my generation was living in the art world. The current generation is living in the art market.” That is really the key to where we are now.

an outstanding critique on contemporary art and its stance on beauty and progress. may come off as a bit crotchety, but full of win and awesome.

Quoted: I’ve spent the better part of an afternoon trolling online museum collections for the word “shock”—either in the title or the describing text. This is hardly a scientific way to produce a list (a lot of museums don’t have searchable databases of their collections online). But it’s deliriously random (kinda like the web), and a good way of discovering how various artists have treated the idea of shock without being all self-conscious about it.

interesting take on "shock art" and playfully avoiding the predictable varieties. which, to be honest, can only be shocking if none can be found in any art school graduation exhibition.