This weekend is a big one in New York, where the Whitney Biennial just opened. Even better, the 608-page March issue of Vogue just arrived in my mailbox! (Yes, I am a subscriber.)
Why mention them in the same post? Well, they are both guilty pleasures. For a long time, flipping through fashion magazines was something I would hide - particularly from anyone I was trying to impress. If someone saw an issue lying on my coffee table (or worse, a year's worth, arranged chronologically), I would protest "I read it for the art reviews! They're very well written!" But mostly I hid these magazines under copies of The New Yorker, which were never fat enough to do the job.
I am not quite so covert about my beloved Vogue now. For one thing, I am not trying to impress anyone these days - and let's face it, people don't come over as much. But something more interesting happened over the past few years - fashion and art embraced each other, and they have not let go. When I saw the ad campaign for Marc Jacobs that featured artist Rachel Feinstein, the painter John Currin's wife, I decided "Hell, this is research!"
Michael Kimmelman, in his review of the Biennial in The New York Times, muses that "Maybe it's impossible, or impossible for the Whitney, to do a show today that doesn't seem beholden to fashion..." As I set out for the navel-gazing circus that is the Whitney Biennial, I am looking forward to forming my own opinion.
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