Artforum Magazine (December 5, 2023) – The latest issue features Fifteen Artists reflect on 2023, “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, The Top Museum Exhibitions of 2023, The top ten art exhibitions of 2023, and more…

Manet/Degas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Jordan Kantor

Curated by Stephan Wolohojian and Ashley E. Dunn

“MANET/DEGAS,” the fall blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins with an unabashed, double-barreled bang: Édouard Manet’s last great self-portrait, paired up alongside one of Edgar Degas’s first. The juxtaposition provides a thrilling object lesson in the stolid compare-and-contrast curatorial methodology that defines the exhibition, but if it’s meant to show the two artists on an equal footing, it doesn’t stage a fair fight. Forty-six years old when he executed Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), ca. 1878–79, Manet is at the height of his painterly power, looking backward and forward at once. 

THE ARTISTS’ ARTISTS

Fifteen artists reflect on 2023

By Kenturah Davis, Vaginal Davis, Anri Sala, Tracey Emin, Doron Langberg, Dena Yago, Adam Alessi, Oto Gillen, Mire Lee, Nigel Howlett, Lúcia Koch, K.R.M. Mooney, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Niklas Taleb, Party Office

To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select a single exhibition or event that most memorably caught their attention in 2023.

KENTURAH DAVIS
Lauren Halsey (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Emerging onto the Met’s rooftop, I’m greeted by sphinxes with faces carved in the likeness of the artist’s loved ones. These figures surround and protect a large architectural monument, its surfaces engraved with coded inscriptions that pay homage to the people and energy of South Central Los Angeles. The structure forgoes the exuberant color I’ve come to expect in Halsey’s work, making me think about the ways Egyptian art and architecture have changed over time—once colorfully embellished, and now animated purely by shadows. In this way, Halsey’s sanctuary suggests that it’s been standing there for millennia, transformed by the sun and communing with the cosmos.

VAGINAL DAVIS
Annette Frick (MARTa Herford, Germany) 
You can easily get royally preggers if you stand too close to the hairy eyeball of Annette Frick. For more than forty years, the Berlin-based photographer-filmmaker and consummate artiste has been known mainly for her captivating chronicles of underground queer scenes. At her retrospectacle “A Moment in No Man’s Land,”  was enchanted by her sensual large-format self-portraits and stunning nude cycle “Aus dem Wasser” (Out of the Water), 2007–2008, referring to mythological figures such as Ondine and Lilith. I had never seen her architecture-portrait hybrids and was mesmerized, wondering just what else she has hidden in her voluptuous archive.

ANRI SALA
Saâdane Afif (Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin) 
It’s difficult to express the poetry and poignancy of Saâdane Afif’s exhibition “The Coalman,” part of the artist’s larger endeavor to give form to a heptahedron. Here, the artist installs his personal collection of coal sculptures handcrafted by miners in their spare time alongside Is it possible that you have no coal left?, 2023, a facsimile of a letter from French composer Claude Debussy to his coal merchant, penned during the particularly severe winter of 1916–17. The repurposed missive serves as a coda to the exhibition as a whole, posing a question that resonates in manifold ways in the present (perhaps even applying to a shortage of new forms).