Archive of Reid Singer

Reid Singer is now an Editorial Assistant at ArtINFO. A talented writer and baal koreh, Reid interned at AFC during the summer and fall of 2011, after receiving his BA in Art History from the University of Chicago.

Reid has written 39 article(s) for AFC.

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Reid Singer

I Was Wrong to Defend Marina Abramovic

by Reid Singer on August 6, 2014
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When critics argued that Marina Abramovic exploited her performers back in 2011, I defended her. Now the Marina Abramovic Institute is seeking unpaid volunteers. I take it back.

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Your Guide to Armory Week

by Reid Singer on March 4, 2013
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Even though the hum around Armory week seems subdued this year, visiting half-a-dozen-plus art fairs can in a few days’ time can feel like a week on a Eurail pass. Naive outsiders are treated harshly, the food is unfamiliar and overpriced, and you spend a lot of time snooping around taking pictures. It’s useful to have an index that you can depend on to guide you towards the things that are worth seeing and away from the things that aren’t. A guidebook if you will. Here’s ours.

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Still More Bad Decisions by Visitors to Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial

by Reid Singer on January 31, 2013
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With a heavy heart, I would like to open the web traffic floodgates to the blog of fashion enthusiast Pelayo Diaz, who is quite possibly the shallowest person in the friggin’ universe.

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“Gerhard Richter Painting” Is Mostly Gerhard Richter Painting

by Reid Singer on April 4, 2012
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How do you make a documentary about abstract painting? When your subject strives for the indescribable, the normal tools of narration and interview become glaringly imperfect; I sympathize with any journalist who feels a sense of futility in the face of a work of art whose emotive power might be ineffable. This includes Corinna Belz, whose film “Gerhard Richter Painting” relies very little on interviews and stated history, and very heavily on long shots of the artist painting in his studio.

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What’s Special About V.I.P. 2.0

by Reid Singer on February 7, 2012
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V.I.P. 2.0 began on Friday and ends today. Is the second-ever online-only art fair, truly a product of the 21st century. And yet in many ways it is indistinguishable from a physical event. The one delightful exception to this is net art, whose exhibitors never need to worry about transferring a physical object into digital form. We have here a system that might allow a lot of artists to make themselves heard.

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Is “The City Dark” Self-Parody?

by Reid Singer on January 25, 2012
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There’s nothing immediately offensive about the premise of Ian Cheney’s new documentary, The City Dark. Living in New York, I can believe that Cheney, an amateur astronomer since his teenage years in Maine, might miss seeing the stars at night, and feel deprived. When he attempts to stretch that wistfulness into an authoritative documentary, however, the results are less than convincing.

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Ai Weiwei is Being Watched

by Reid Singer on January 21, 2012
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As it debuts at Sundance this weekend, Alison Klayman’s “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” is being pre-emptively treated by critics as a highlight of the festival. We take a sneak peek at the documentary, which shadowed Ai for years leading up to his detention.

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The Show That Has Everything: The Language of Less at the Chicago MCA

by Reid Singer on January 16, 2012
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At The Language of Less (Then and Now), visitors get a well-balanced primer on Minimalism and Post-Minimalism with no glaring omissions or gaps. Like any greatest hits album, it aims to please, and it usually does. But it will never succeed in satisfying a true fan.

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Sundance Film Festival Art Highlights: Dog Orbits Earth, Abramovic “The Artist is Present” Doc Debuts

by Reid Singer on January 6, 2012
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Cold weather, Robert Redford, and an excuse to turn off our phones for at least six hours a day. These are just a few of the attractions awaiting visitors to the Sundance Film Festival, which kicks off in Park City, Utah in two weeks. From the looks of the 2012 program, we should expect an array of precocious documentaries, trippy animated films, and bourgeois coming-of-age maneuvers (for some reason, they’ve decided to re-screen “Reality Bites”). It is, in short, an uneven mix of pyrite and gold.

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