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Barry Schwabsky
Art Critic
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation. He also writes regularly for such publications as New Left Review and Artforum (where is co-editor of international reviews). He has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College (University of London), among others. His most recent books include collections of poems, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, New York, 2015) and literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2018). In 2016 Verso (New York and London) published The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present, a selection of Schwabsky’s art criticism from The Nation.
His latest collection is energized by his engagement with sociopolitical trends, but it’s not clear what scope this leaves him to show the art he writes about as anything more than symptomatic.
A recent exhibition of art made during the Gulf War tells two stories: one about the Western media and another about those who witnessed the war firsthand.
With dealers and curators jumping on the figurative bandwagon, we have to look more closely at whether a new cohort of painters succeeds at what they’re attempting.
In a recent show curated by the New York painter and sculptor, as well as a showcase of his new work, his particular artistic psychogeography comes to life.
The show claims to explore questions of sincerity amid a world of fakes, but the shallow results end up reinforcing long-held problems about the museum as an institution.
