HELP DESK is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to–contemporary art. Submit your questions 100% anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Follow us on twitter: @ArtHelpDeskI’m just about to finish my first really serious series of paintings, and I’m curious about which approach is the best for self-promotion. Is it[.....]

Jonathan Ehrenberg‘s The Outskirts conjures a world of mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply disorienting beauty. Currently on view at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, the artist’s latest video envisions a world of visual enchantment and visceral disquiet, of existential ambivalence and psychic uncertainty. With its opening shot of a shadowed, densely wooded landscape, The Outskirts plunges us into a world that is superficially suggestive of yet atmospherically apart[.....]

In contemporary U.S. culture, abstract art is difficult for many to grasp because it so completely defeats the imposition of language on art that cultural meaning falls away. If abstract art asserts meaning at all, it does so elliptically, circling around, not toward, the identifiable expression of objects, events, people, experiences, emotions, or ideas that representational art depicts. In a sense, then, abstract art is[.....]

The leering white faces watch from the walls. They follow you from room to room, vacant eyes staring out from behind their grotesque masks. Though the lower part of their jaws are missing—unhinged—their slit-like eyes and upturned mouths indicate that the figures are consumed with mirth. We see the same white mask over and over, but from various angles: on its side, in three-quarter profile,[.....]

HELP DESK is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to–contemporary art. Submit your questions 100% anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Follow us on twitter: @ArtHelpDesk This week’s column features the artwork of David Byrd, whose solo exhibition Introduction: A Life of Observation is currently on view at Greg Kucera[.....]

In Art, I am generally not a fan of beautiful landscapes. That is not to say that I do not appreciate the inherent splendor of nature, it just always seems too picturesque and subsequently too easy.  The source of my aversion is popular visual culture’s inundation of images showing over-saturated suns rising or setting, paths and docks receding into the distance, and natural monuments impressing[.....]

iona ROZEAL brown’s stylized painting emerges from a studied transmutation of African-American and Japanese cultural tradition. Brown has developed a strong narrative lineage essential to reading her coded (albeit straightforward) illustrative paintings of Afro-Japanese courtesans, voguing stars, and fantasy creatures of mythic royalty. Brown’s concurrent exhibitions at Salon 94 Freemans and Edward Tyler Nahem seek to extend and perpetuate this narrative in a new elaboration[.....]