Sometimes I wonder if it’s time to pack it in, or move over to Substack where (I assume) the format isn’t so trying and there’s less “blog” stigma.
Follow on Instagram for updates: https://www.instagram.com/dave.dyment.
Sunday, February 15, 2026
6000 posts
Adrian Searle
Sad to read that Adrian Searle is leaving his post as the chief art critic at the Guardian, after thirty years of writing. The paper announced Friday that his final article - a look back at three decades - will run on April 1st.
I stayed at his London house about a decade ago, and more than once opted to stay home and go through his collection rather than go out (that’s his Hans-Peter Feldmann title, below). Bookshelves lined the rooms, from floor to ceiling.
Originally a painter - represented by Nigel Greenwood Gallery - Searle gave it up when he began at the Guardian.
"I was always torn between making art and writing,” he said, "Writing won."
His criticism ranged across painting, sculpture, performance, video, and installation, and he was an early champion of many artists who have gone on to considerable success, including Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili and Gillian Wearing.
Searle also curated exhibitions at Serpentine Gallery, La Casa Encendida, Hayward Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Frith Street Gallery. He served as a juror for the Turner Prize (2004), Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation and the Kurt Schwitters Prize (2009–13).
In addition to the Guardian, his writings have appeared in The Independent, Time Out, Artscribe magazine, Artforum, El Mundo, and Frieze.
Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, said “The Guardian will miss Adrian’s fantastic writing on the visual arts, and so will I. His reviews are always perceptive, insightful, and often funny. He looks at art with incredible care, even tenderness, and notices the details that make it soar or sink. Adrian’s body of work creates a high bar for the Guardian to live up to as we continue to deliver more of the rigorous, world-class culture coverage he has championed for three decades.”
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Roula Partheniou | Party All the Time
Roula Partheniou
Party All the Time
acrylic on wood, 2026
16 x 11.3 x 11.3 cm
Unique work
I think of works in this series (ephemeral party favours such as balloons, hats, noisemakers, etc., rendered in mdf) as a form of having your cake and eating it too.
This hand-painted turned wooden party hat was made for the annual Sweetest Little Thing auction and gala, which takes place in Sackville every Valentine’s Day. Artists are invited to donate small works which are auctioned off to support the programming of both venues.
Bidding closes tonight at www.sweetestlittlething.ca.
Friday, February 13, 2026
My Dinner with Daniel
Having just seen Peter Hujar’s Day last night, My Dinner With Andre was already on my mind when I saw this announcement:
"Today we’re announcing the exclusive VHS release of a film with Daniel Johnston & Jad Fair called “My Dinner with Daniel.” It’ll be out on our web store 3/13.
Filmed in 1988 at the home of Half Japanese co-founder David Fair, this raw VHS footage is a work of cinema verite. Daniel Johnston, Jad Fair, Susan Fair, David Fair and Charles Brohawn (The Tinklers) all participate in this intimate, unguarded gathering. Daniel performs some of his classic material, including the astonishing “Don’t Play Cards with Satan” from the documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston”.
Jad Fair says of the film:
“What if the film ‘My Dinner With Andre’ was with Daniel Johnston instead of Andre? We didn’t know what would happen, but we knew it was bound to be great. On the last day of the recording session for the album ‘It’s Spooky’ Daniel and I were invited over to my brother David’s home to have dinner.
We filmed the dinner with a VHS camera. It’s Daniel telling stories and singing songs. It’s time now for dinner and you’re invited. Kick off your shoes and pull up a chair. Here’s ‘My Dinner With Daniel.’”
Why VHS? Well, we chose to release this on VHS both because Daniel is the undisputed champion of the cassette format, as well as because that’s the format the film was originally shot on.
“My Dinner With Daniel” will be limited to a first pressing of 250 hand-numbered copies.”
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Beverly Glenn Copeland
Last week musician, trans-activist, and former Sackville resident Beverly Glenn Copeland released a new album in collaboration with his wife Elizabeth Copeland. Titled Laughter in Summer, the recording can be listened to here.
Signed copies of the compilation Transmissions (Sackville Edition) are still available from Struts Gallery, here.
And Kerri Reid has contributed a hand-sewn felt finger puppet of Copeland to an auction benefiting Struts and the Owens Art Gallery. Bid on it here:
She made me a great Yoko Ono finger puppet a few years ago, here.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Monday, February 9, 2026
Kynaston McShine | Information
Kynaston McShine [editor]
Information
New York City, USA: : The Museum of Modern Art, 1970
208 pp., 21 x 28 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
Debuting in the summer of 1970, the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Information was far from the first to document the burgeoning Conceptual Art scene, but distinguished itself through it’s international scope, curatorial approach, and this accompanying publication.
The MoMA press release stated that "the exhibition and catalog contain work by more than 150 men and women from 15 countries including artists from Argentina, Brazil, Canada1, and Yugoslavia, being shown in this country for the first time [...] The only common denominator is that all are trying to extend the idea of art beyond traditional categories.”
These artists (and artist collectives) included Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Mel Bochner, George Brecht, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byers, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert and George, Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, N.E. Thing Co., Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Edward Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, and dozens others.
Arriving mere months after college campuses erupted in violence protesting Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia (and the death of four students shot by National Guardsmen), the exhibition inevitably featured works that responded to the political unrest.
As the below schedule will attest, John Giorno programmed his Dial-A-Poem project so that callers might hear celebrated poets (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs) alongside members of the Black Panther Party (Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver), The Weather Underground (Bernadine Dohrn) and the
Chicago Seven (Abbie Hoffman).
“At this point, with the war and the repression and everything, we thought this was a good way for the Movement to reach people,” Giorno wrote. This did not go unnoticed. The FBI caught wind of the work and several agents reportedly spent a day in the museum, listening on the phones to Dial-A-Poem.
Hans Haacke had proposed a piece entitled MoMA Poll, in which visitors would respond to a particular question by depositing their answers in one of two transparent Plexiglas ballot boxes. The artist neglected to provide the specific question to be asked until right before the opening. His query directly implicated a major donor and board member of MoMA: "Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?” By the exhibition’s conclusion in September, the Yes ballots outweighed the No, two to one [see below].
The publication continued this co-mingling conceptualism with political activism. Curator Kynaston McShine wrote, “If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you probably have had a neighbour who has been in jail for having long hair, or for not being “dressed” properly; and if you are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in your bed, or more formally in Indochina.”
The general image section of the volume included photographs of the Black Panthers, Che Guevera, the Great Wall of China, newspaper headlines about the Vietnam War, Bernie Boston’s Flower Power2 photograph, and the notorious And Babies poster that the MoMA had refused to distribute the year prior.
“[The publication] was very much of its time,” recalled McShine, later. "One of the things I did in the catalogue was give each artist a page to do whatever they wanted to do.” This allowed the book to function autonomously, rather than merely document exhibition.
The artist pages featured contributions in the form of photographic documentation, drawings, diagrams and descriptive texts. Many related to projects presented in the exhibition, but often artists included other work, sometimes pieces that had not yet been realized.
The title also included a six-page recommended reading list, a chance-based index by Lucy Lippard, and a partial "but representative list of films that reflect many of the concerns and attitudes of the artists represented in the exhibition.”4
The original title now sells for upwards of five hundred dollars. In 2019, MoMA released a fiftieth anniversary facsimile reprint, which can be bought for $17.50 US, here.
1. Canadians represented includ David Askevold, Iain & Ingrid Baxter, Gerald Ferguson, Les Levine, Michael Snow, Jeff Wall, Joyce Weiland, Ian Wilson and Marshall McLuhan, who is also cited countless times throughout the volume. The Information archive contains over twenty issues of his DEW-LINE newsletter and the includes his DISTANT EARLY WARNING cards from 1969.
2. Taken on October 21, 1967, during the March on the Pentagon by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Boston's photograph depicts protester George Harris placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion.
3.The “Recommended Reading” list includes Books, Periodicals & Articles, and Exhibition catalogues (even a vinyl record: Art by Telephone). Authors include John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Lucy Lippard, Adrian Piper, Seth Siegelaub, Mao Tse-Tun and others.
4. The film list includes works by Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, K.P. Brehmer, Stanley Brouwn, Christo, Bruce Conner, Hanne Darboven, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham, Les Levine, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Luca Patella, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Joyce Weiland, and many others.
"The INFORMATION catalogue, an adjunct to the show, is being sold in the Museum bookstore. Specifically for the catalogue, Kynaston McShine has selected a variety of photographs that document his essay. The photographs, strong in visual imagery, depict 1970 life styles that greatly influence INFORMATION artists. Referring to these 150 artists from 15 countries abroad, Mr. McShine says, "Those represented are part of a culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems such as television and film, and by increased mobility. Therefore, photographs, documents, films and ideas, which are rapidly transmitted, have become an important part of this new work.”
- MoMA press release, 1970
"On the esthetic front, the events of spring 1970 drastically affected curator Kynaston McShine’s “Information” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The show was intended to introduce to the establishment the products of some four years of relatively underground Conceptual art, to document the new art within a “culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems.” When it opened in July, however, many of the artists had revised their contributions to express their outrage at the war. The exhibition catalogue was particularly radical: the AWC’s And Babies poster was reproduced; the endpapers were serial photographs of a vast unidentified demonstration in Washington; and there were fifty pages of uncaptioned photographs making up the body of the catalogue and transforming it into a hybrid artist’s book. They mixed art and politics in a McLuhanesque jumble to an extent the show did not, including the Great Wall of China, a plane crash, our men on the moon, Che Guevara, Marcel Duchamp, flowers in guns, the Black Panthers, rock and roll groups, Native American earth drawings, and computer data.”
- Lucy Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art
Friday, February 6, 2026
David Shrigley | Gold Disc
David Shrigley
Gold Disc
Margate, UK: Counter Editions, 2012
45 x 33.5 cm.
Edition of 100 initialled, dated and numbered copies
Thursday, February 5, 2026
Marian Goodman
Gallerist and founder of Multiples Inc., Marian Goodman died yesterday at the age of 97.
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
On Display: General Idea
“4 Feb. - 29 Mar. 2026
On Display: General Idea
Rare and Out of Print Books and Editions
Art Metropole is pleased to present a display of rare and out of print artists’ books, catalogues, and editions by General Idea, produced between 1975–2022.
General Idea was formed in Toronto in 1969 by Jorge Zontal (1944–1994), Felix Partz (1945–1994), and AA Bronson (b. 1946). They began publishing FILE Megazine in 1972 as a magazine by artists for artists, an offshoot of the mail art phenomenon that was happening at the time. To their surprise, the international mail art community responded with bushel-bags of mail art, which they felt had cultural value. In 1974 they established Art Metropole as both an archive and a distribution centre for artists’ non-traditional materials, including mail art, artists’ books and magazines, video, and audio. Both a publishing practice and a shop inevitably followed. To General Idea, Art Metropole was itself, conceptually, an artwork.
The publications and editions exhibited in this display are a testament to the group’s boundary-pushing media practice and their contributions to non-traditional art forms and artist-run culture internationally.
On Display is a series which highlights artworks from Art Metropole’s vast inventory of over 16,000 artists’ editions and publications.
Browse available General Idea works here.”
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Endre Tót | Book of An Extremely Glad Artist
Endre Tót
Book of An Extremely Glad Artist
Berlin, Germany: Rainer Verlag, 1981
190 pp., 15 x 10 cm., softcover
Edition of 1000
An Artist's book by Endre Tót compiling twelve of his previously published artists books into a single volume. The contents include:
My Unpainted Canvases
Night Visit to The National Gallery
1/2 Dozen Incomplete Visual Informations
Zero-Texts
Nullified Dialogue
TÓTal zerOs
Rain Postcards
Rainy Sentences
Gladness Writings
Gladness Stories
TÓTalJOYS
I am glad if I can write sentences
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