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Art News

All is not as it seems

2/5/2025

Kiki Smith self portrait

This month’s art news is filled with dreams, confusions and deceptions with lawyers going to court to argue that fake art is the same as the real thing it imitates. Is all art now trompe l’oeil? 

Exhibit one: Sally Mann has been arguably America’s most famous photographer since her “At Twelve; Photographs of Young Women” documented the creepiness of a child molester who was soon after shot dead by the abused 12-year-old-girl’s mother, in 1988. Time magazine proclaimed Mann “America’s greatest photographer” in 2001. She has used the American South and her own children as subjects of haunting beauty. 

However, Texas Modern Art Museum (TMAM) was bitch-slapped into disagreeing about Mann’s worth, genuflecting before politicians and art heathens who proclaimed Mann’s art “child porn.” TMAM removed their Manns and ran away from the media. Hide your kids, Larassa Kabel.  

Exhibit two: Des Moines Art Center’s fantastic new show “Figments and Phantoms” buys into the “all is not what it seems” dream with brilliant body distortions by great photographers. Through mirrors, double exposures, costumes and 360 degree lenses, Hans Breder, Victor Obsatz, Marcel Duchamp, Kiki Smith, Laura Aguilar, Cindy Sherman, Rachel Cox, Andy Warhol, Mitchell Squire and Alec Soth transform bodies into “Figments and Phantoms.” 

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Soth, whose “Sleeping by the Mississippi” was our choice as the best exhibition to visit Des Moines in 2006, is naturally compared to Sally Mann. Both reveal entire cultures in a snap shot of mysterious Americana. Soth’s solo show at Omaha’s Joslyn Museum opens Feb. 15, as does Joslyn’s long-awaited exhibition of American railroad art. That day after Valentine’s day in Omaha is our choice for road trip of the month. 

Exhibit three: After the 2025 Pennsylvania Farm Show closed last month, its thousand-pound butter sculpture “From Moo to Marvel: Dairy Cows Power Pennsylvania” was “deconstructed.” That is a word invented by Ivy League grad school teacher Jacques Derida in order to prove that grad school profs know something that the rest of us don’t know. That butter cow was recycled in a digester to produce “enough energy to power one home for three days.” Hey, Pennsylvania, corn is cheaper and far more efficient than butter.

Exhibit four: Always looking for ways to prove they know something the rest of us don’t, Hollywood elitists anointed “The Brutalist” as the new high priest of their megalomania. That 215-minutes-long, totally symbolic film’s print copy weighs 300 pounds. The movie’s size was deconstructed by New York Vulture columnist Nate Jones. 

Excerpts: There is a 30-seconds shot of the Statue of Liberty upside down; five minutes of “depressing handjobs”; one minute of vintage pornography; 30 minutes of “bellowing about modernist architecture”; 13 minutes of The Brutalist’s niece gazing silently into the camera; 12 minutes of unveiled Anti Semitism; two minutes of Anti-Semitic pornography, much of it vintage; 14 minutes of The Brutalist’s affair with heroin; one minute of “period-inappropriate” pubic hair; and 30 seconds in which The Brutalist’s vision is finally revealed. TMAM needs to see it; no one else does.

The movie’s dubious acclaim put Brutalist architecture in some crosshairs. Donald Trump reportedly hates it, and D.C. is full of empty Brutalist style government buildings. But most owners of Brutalist homes, which did not burn in Southern California fires, love it.

Exhibit five: Liberty Mutual and Great American insurance companies asked a Florida court to block a $19.7 million claim by owners of more than two dozen forged paintings (not by Jean-Michel Basquiat) that were seized during an FBI raid of the Orlando Museum of Art. 

The insurers say the owners should have known that the works were counterfeits and have no value. “Defendants do not have any valid claim to proceeds from this ‘loss’ since there is no loss to begin with,” the companies said in court papers modeled after “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” 

Exhibit six: Moberg Gallery’s new show this month, like its previous show in January, features the works of a recently retired art museum director whose painting process is his message. That message is delivered by painting and erasing in Jeff Fleming’s case last month, and by painting, rotating and painting over paint in that of Al Harris-Fernandez. His show opens Friday, Feb. 7. ♦

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