Alicia Eler is a cultural critic and arts reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and author of "The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture" (2017).
Art
CHICAGO — Media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said that television is cool and radio is hot. This isn’t a temperature thing, but rather a classification of media based on the participation it involves from viewers.
News
A new study by a team of Finnish researchers recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) analyzes where we feel emotions in our bodies.
Art
CHICAGO — We're starting 2014 off right with lots and lots of selfies. Now that we've crowned the selfie kings, it's back to selfie business as usual.
Opinion
The great Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo ate fish and bread like most everybody else.
Art
Some photographs are best left to be discovered decades after they were first exposed. Much like the work of Vivian Maier — whose images were found years after she said her goodbyes — a recent finding of 22 undeveloped cellulose nitrate negatives from a 1914-1917 Antarctic expedition reignites our w
Art
CHICAGO — The race for selfie king is on. James Franco's piece in the New York Times now rivals Benny Winfield Jr.'s interview in VICE. But there are multiple selfie kings, not just one.
Opinion
Which television family do you prefer: the Jetsons or the Simpsons? If you picked the former, you will certainly enjoy this visit to the future past, when sci-fi-esque advertisements provided a vision of the then-future, which is now a part of our present reality.
Art
CHICAGO — For two days in a row this past weekend, I boarded the train to Forest Park at the Damen Blue Line station. Dragging my feet up the snow- and dirt-muddied stairs, I looked up to see flowers — actually collages of images of flowers, cacti, and other foliage. They were, I soon learned, creat
Opinion
CHICAGO — In the age of social-networked identities, when every private thought is often public declaration, what does it mean to be "good" or "bad"? Our words become performances, our self-portraits become selfies, and we are present as online brands. It becomes hard to take emotional moments serio
Art
CHICAGO — For the past three Christmas seasons at The Suburban, an artist-run project space in Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's Oak Park backyard, artist Diego Leclery has decided to become a polar bear.
Art
CHICAGO — The unwieldy synthetic materials of late capitalism’s throwaway culture are worth their weight in gold spray-painted styrofoam bricks. In her solo exhibition Ornament at the Riverside Arts Center's Freeark Gallery, artist Sabina Ott shoves aside the confines of what constitutes acceptable,
Art
CHICAGO — Just because "selfies" was named Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year and Barack Obama shot that funeral selfie doesn't mean these internet self-portraits are a passing fad.