Karen Kilimnik: Fashion, Victim, Fan, Fiction
A little over a decade after Brenda Ann Spencer’s 1979 school shooting at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, Karen Kilimnik used the crime as the premise for an artwork.
The first modern school shooter was a sixteen-year-old girl named Brenda Ann Spencer. In 1979, she opened fire on Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, from her house across the road, killing two adults, and injuring nine others. When questioned about her motive, Spencer reportedly replied, “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
Related
Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
Emily Kam Kngwarray’s art has been claimed, framed, and re-framed—by critics, curators, and institutions alike. But what remains of the singular, personal encounter with her work?
As Melbourne’s art institutions blur the line between art and design, a corporate logic of spectacle, lifestyle, and marketability takes hold. Is the NGV’s embrace of design a progressive expansion—or just kitsch in highbrow drag? And if public museums have abandoned art, who’s left to protect it?
