Author: Michael Fallon

  • The Man Who Fell to Pittsburgh

    I recently sat down to speak with Douglas Fogle–the curator of the 2008 Carnegie International–in his office at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It was a fine, bright spring day about one month into the run of the latest version of the great survey exhibition of international artists that was first mounted in 1896, and…

  • Oh Man, Look at Those Cavemen Go!

    On my first pass through the 2008 Carnegie International, the massive, just-mounted edition of the 112-year-old international art survey that runs through next January at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, I eighty-percent hated the show. It started with the forced theme, "Life on Mars"–the first time ever that the show has had a…

  • Come Join the Vicious Circle

    "That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment." -Dorothy Parker Over ten long, occasionally checkered, years as an art critic here in Minnesota, here’s one thing I’ve learned: Making your way in the world today, as a visual artist…

  • A Picture is Worth 5,000 Years

    “A photo is all I have left of her,” Chris Lang, the boyfriend of murdered college student Dru Sjodin, told a Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee at the Minnesota House of Representatives. His testimony culminated with a heated statement about Level Three sex offenders: “They’re not like normal people. I think they’re wired wrong. They’re…

  • Not For Sale

    Artist Santiago Cucullu has worked himself into a corner. In recent months, the twenty-something former Minneapolitan has struck proverbial gold in the art world—appearing in the Walker Art Center’s multinational blockbuster exhibition “When Latitudes Become Forms,” and also landing a one-year residency at the Core Artists Program at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. So…