The Best New York Art Shows of 2024
In November, Sotheby’s made history when it sold a painting made by artificial intelligence for a million bucks. Ai-Da robot, “the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house,” created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembled nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, Sotheby’s described the sale as “a new frontier in the global art market.”
As I look back on the year in art in New York, in which big claims were made for found art and appropriation and scraps of things being sewn to other scraps of things, I feel there is much, technically speaking, that an artificial intelligence could copy. But what AI is missing (besides, you know, real originality or human consciousness) is the ability to deliver that electric hit of what Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.” From the Renaissance all the way up to the scrappy capers of Jamian Juliano-Villani and Klara Lidén, we saw that humans continue to go where no machine has gone before.
“Ayiti Toma II: Faith, Family, and Resistance,” Luhring Augustine
A stunning cross-generational survey of Haitian art, curated by Tomm El-Saieh, that explored family, faith, and political resistance.
Matthew Barney / Alex Katz, 165 Allen Street
Feral genius Jamian Juliano-Villani deployed two giants of American art to remake a haunted pop-up space. This show wowed.
Huma Bhabha, David Zwirner
Bhabha’s great bronze figures are like Giacometti sculptures bulked up and torn apart by steroids.
Yvonne Wells, Fort Gansevoort
This self-taught 84-year-old Alabama-based living treasure created abstract quilts that spoke of beautiful and conflicted American histories.
Klara Lidén, Reena Spaulings
As part of a video installation, Liden set herself the task of crawling through the 12-by-12-inch diamond-shaped holes required by the city in construction site walls. The result ends up being a perfect metaphor for art: a useless action that ends up being useful.
Arthur Jafa, Gladstone
Jaffa revisited one of the most violent scenes in cinematic history, recasting and re-choreographing the bloody finale of Taxi Driver so that Travis Bickle’s victims are Black. Jafa’s masterful film makes clear that Bickle was also motivated by racism.
Clarity Haynes, Situations
Intense, even shocking large-scale paintings of one of the most common things in the world, yet almost never pictured in art: the crowning of a child’s head during birth. The results were spectacular, allowing us to see and think about this mystic gift.
Christopher Wool, 101 Greenwich St.
Wool rented out a raw, 18,000-square-foot space on the 19th floor of a building in lower Manhattan to exhibit his strictly abstract paintings, mostly black-and-white and rust-colored. The result was a wraparound exercise in forgoing the gallery system.
“Sienna: The Rise of Painting,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The miracle that is early Sienese painting is an origin point for all western art. Here were dazzling, golden scenes of saints and martyrs, some of the most sensual figuration ever put to brush.
“The Way I See It,” Drawing Center
Radical connoisseurship, radical openness, radical generosity — these are the qualities that define the personal collection of Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS, a selection of which he displayed this fall. More than 350 works on paper by more than 60 outsiders, cartoonists, graffiti masters, illustrators, and others not usually accepted into the canon of high art, from Jim Nutt to Martin Ramirez to neurodivergent genius Nicole Appel. KAWS supposedly owns 4,000 works by artists like these. A museum should show this extraordinary amassment.