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Articles by Dushko Petrovich
Big Jill, Little Jimmy, Little Rosalynn, Big Joe
Every day now unfolds to the rhythms of the internet news cycle. The specific items we follow have been diverging, but the following itself is more and more synchronized. Everyone fixes on the new things coming over the media horizon: you watch a story, or a controversy, emerge, grow, and peak. You almost never watch it shrink and disappear. How would you even begin to do that? The thought never crosses your mind.
Portrait Painting's Timely Comeback
The official presidential portrait began with George Washington, who was painted in 1796 by Gilbert Stuart, among the pre-eminent American artists of his time. This tradition, of a painter depicting a president, usually soon after the end of his final term, continued after the advent of photography mostly as a matter of ceremony.
Post What?
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, 1981. Post-minimalist Decades ago, Richard Serra borrowed an expensive Brancusi book from an artist I know. He kept it too long, ignoring several requests to return it. When he finally brought it back, almost a year later, he casually mentioned he “got forty ideas” off the Romanian. Post-Brooklynist A friend had gotten fed up with the annual rent increases. He decided to tell his landlord off and move further into Bushwick. It was really satisfying.
Where Should Art History Go in the Future? As Survey Courses Change, the Past Evolves
Curricular changes rarely make headlines even in the confines of a college town, but after Yale University’s art history department announced plans to revamp its introductory survey courses with global offerings less focused on Europe and the United States, the news prompted a national outcry.
Bring in the Boss
A couple of years ago, in a failed attempt to release decades of frustration with the Democratic Party’s painful, self-defeating rightward drift, I decided to retaliate—via hat. I went on the first embroidery site I could find and made a quick mockup. Text: Make Democrats Great Again; color: purple.
Rise of the Blur
You have seen the blurs. They are everywhere foregrounded in the news. Right now I’m looking at a New York Times photo of mustachioed former national security adviser John Bolton speaking at a podium. A dramatically encroaching form, the back of whoever was sitting in front of photographer Win McNamee, takes up the entire left half of the picture. Between the podium and the blur, Bolton is squeezed in, darkly—which is how I feel, too, looking at him being swallowed up like that.
All Thumbs
Photo by Andrea Hanks. Roland Barthes famously analyzed photographs in terms of studium and punctum: studium is the visual and intellectual setting of a picture, punctum the crucial disturbance that holds a memorable image in our mind—“that accident which pricks, bruises me.” The accidental, bruising prick in the now-infamous photo from the hospital in El Paso is obviously Donald Trump himself.
Art Chronicle; or, The Icon Emigrating
El Greco and Philip Guston at the Met El Greco is like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing triangles. Guston is staying up and seeing french fries. It was a punchy gray dream to see them together. Without El Greco, it would have been impossible to imagine, and useless to be shown, what the iconic color and space of the East would do when hit with the overwhelming technologies of Venetian oil paint and perspective.
Small Ads
This piece first appeared as part of the “See Something, Say Something” series at our sister art magazine, Paper Monument. We are now surrounded on all sides by small ads. For the time being, we reassure ourselves not so much with their tininess, but with their inaccurate aim. My affection for Tottenham Hotspur—the English soccer team—means that omniscient Gmail sends me endless ads about bone spurs.
We Stand Together
In foggy Takoma Park, Maryland, just across the D.C. border, the sidewalks were dotted with pink hats and handmade signs. They streamed down to Takoma station where all the subway cars were also packed with pink. A bracing, high-pitched roar greeted each train’s arrival. The sound, which coursed through the crowd at random intervals throughout the day, was unlike any rallying cry I had heard before. The volume and pitch were easy to explain: it was the sound of one million women – and yes, some men.
False Nine vs. Real Nine
The unofficial propaganda about the European Championship is that it is “even harder to win than the World Cup.” This of course is crazy talk, as evidenced by the fact that Denmark and Greece—two teams that will never get a sniff of the Jules Rimet Trophy—have won the Euros.
Check Out the Neymar Rolling Meme
The World Cup so far has been apocalyptically good.
The New Face of Portrait Painting
So why is portraiture returning now? For one, there is an institutional urgency to speak to a more diverse audience with painting that depicts the black community, the Asian-American experience, the Latino face, to attract the various people who had been excluded from the museum by remaking the history of figurative painting, this time with color. Not that the trend toward realist portraits is exclusive to artists of color.
In the Context of No Context: A Digital Billboard in Chicago Raises Questions About Art in the Public Sphere
Flashing brightly for a few seconds at a time, the black-and-white mugshot of an unnamed African-American male loomed against the Chicago skyline, interrupting the mundane ads—for sandwiches, lawyers, Hondas—that shared space on the same digital billboard. I only just glimpsed it, peering from an overpass, but the haunting image has lingered with me ever since.
The Center of Attraction: Expo Chicago Stretches From the Highways to the Pier
The most serene art-viewing experience offered by Expo Chicago turns out to be on Grand Avenue, just west of Peoria Street, above eight lanes of traffic on the I-90/94 overpass. I began my fair experience there, two miles inland, with the intermittent hum of rush hour, in an attempt to organize myself spatially, proceeding from the outer reaches of the show to its very center, a point I was going to have to determine when I got to Navy Pier.
Peter Doig Wins Bizarre Authentication Trial
Peter Doig has won the bizarre authentication trial in which he was accused of disavowing a painting that the plaintiffs, art dealer Peter Bartlow and a former corrections officer Robert Fletcher, claimed he had painted as a teen.
Peter Doig Testifies in Bizarre Authentication Trial
The painter Peter Doig began his much-anticipated courtroom testimony Monday, August 15, alongside a digital image of a Lakehead University ID for one Peter Doige, with an e. The artist’s lawyer, Matthew Dontzin, asked him simply: Is that you? No. Have you ever been to Thunder Bay? No. Do you have any criminal record in Canada? No. Were you ever prevented from traveling to the US because a drug conviction? No. Have you ever sought employment from the Seafarers Union?
Here’s What Happened on the Last Day of Peter Doig’s Ridiculous Trial
With labyrinthine rhetoric about uncanny convergences, induced coincidences, secret photos, and even “a Twilight Zone” of evidence caused by “too many records,” the closing arguments in the final day of the Peter Doig trial were as strange and unsettling as the case itself.
The Living Dead: Why Are Curators Putting Deceased Artists in Contemporary Art Shows?
The peculiar appearance of Forrest Bess, the “pseudo-hermaphrodite” painter, at the 2012 Whitney Biennial still stands out in my memory. The eleven paintings were vivid and haunting, and his story of genital self-surgery, with accompanying photo-documentation, was even harder to forget. In a further strangeness, his work and personal effects were presented not by the show’s official curators—Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders—but by a fellow artist, Robert Gober.
Finally, the Niche Publication Adjunct Professors Never Knew They Needed
The sentiment behind artist and adjunct professor Dushko Petrovich’s new venture Adjunct Commuter Weekly is that the hundreds of thousands of part-time professors who commute between multiple campuses to make ends meet are a prime demographic for their own niche publication.
What the Biennale’s Like Without All the B.S. -- Vulture
Painter and writer Dushko Petrovich, one of the editors of Brooklyn’s occasionally appearing arts journal Paper Monument, maintains a Facebook page on which he gnomically “blogs” about his life in the art world. Herewith, a sample of Petrovich's star-fucking-free thoughts and micro-observations on the first several days of the Venice Biennale, where he is helping produce the Polish pavilion. 1.
The Art of Making Magazines edited by Victor S. Navasky and Evan Cornog
If you're reading this, it's a safe bet you read magazines. Technically, you may even be reading one now—though I'm not sure if bookforum.com really qualifies. The ".com" might denote precisely what isn't Bookforum. I'm typing onto a computer screen; you're reading from one. No trees have been killed. Are we in a magazine? I'm asking because I don't honestly know. For now, let's say we aren't.
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