ICA Boston: worth the trip, even for the yacht-less

When I visited the ICA a few weeks ago, I saw a work that, as you approach it, resembles two smooth wooden cubes. It’s not particularly spectacular from afar: the wooden pieces are neatly, even artistically, placed together, but they could be anything: a bench, an empty display base. As you come closer, you see…

Blowing Boston’s ICA out of the water

Mere moments after enthusiastically adding Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art to my cultural to-do list, I came across an article in Boston Magazine that drained the majority of my anticipation. In The ICA: Exhibitionists?, Rachel Levitt Slade critiques everything from the museum’s unapproachable exterior to the shows themselves, which she says lack substance and long-term…

Planning a Boston art world re-introduction

With the big move from New York to Boston just around the corner, I’ve been compiling a mental list of sites to explore upon arrival. Sure, I grew up in Boston, visited and took classes at the MFA, browsed Newbury Street’s galleries…but I have a feeling things have changed in the last 12 years. So…

Stepping into the world of Asian art on the Cape

Reading Cynthia Freedland’s “But is it art?” with its insights into some of the most controversial pieces produced in recent years (Damien Hirst’s dead shark and Serrano’s Piss Christ among them) has made me wonder: who are today’s top-ranking contemporary artists, and is all their work equally…bizarre and unconventional? The answer I found surprised me:…