Art
Art Rx
This week, performance takes over, plus DJ Spooky at the Metropolitan Museum and a festival dedicated to the Cinema of Transgression.
Jillian Steinhauer
Opinion
Imagining the Payphones of the Future
I suspect everyone who's wandered around New York — or any major city, really — has had the experience of walking past a payphone and wondering about its fate. Public phones often strike me as the ultimate objects in transition, relics from a pre-digital age dotting the cityscape. It may be a coinci
Art
Mickalene Thomas and the Seduction of Beauty
Mickalene Thomas's current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is a visual marvel. Bright colors, shimmering rhinestones, chaotic patterns, and bold-faced women abound. And not separately, mind you — Thomas has a proclivity for mashing up up into exquisitely rendered wholes that take the cut-and-paste
Art
Populating the Empty Spaces of Detroit
What's most often missing from pictures of Detroit are people. They don't quite work in the landscape of ruin porn, enamored as it of empty, decaying spaces that seem beautiful precisely because they're devoid of the life they once had. Showing people would suggest that Detroit is more than just a s
Opinion
Rereading Ada Louise Huxtable: 5 Essential Pieces
In honor of her death earlier this week, here are five significant reviews and essays by pioneering architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable.
News
27th Street Chelsea Galleries Hard Hit by Sandy Will Reopen This Weekend
Five galleries sit in a row on the northern edge of Chelsea, lined up on 27th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. All of them are fairly small, by Chelsea standards, and a bit rougher around the edges, perhaps a bit more experimental, than your average neighborhood space. Unfortunately, all
Opinion
Kickstarter Raised $274M Last Year
Here and there in recent months, there have been grumblings about Kickstarter burnout. There have also been Kickstarter indecision crises — how do you know when to pledge, and how much? — and Kickstarter skepticism. But to all the naysayers, nonbelievers, and doubters, Kickstarter might now present
News
Connecticut Town Plans to Collect and Burn Violent Video Games
You may have thought (hoped?) book/media burning was a thing of the past, but this Saturday, a town some 30 miles from Newtown, Connecticut, the site of a horrific elementary-school shooting last month, will hold a violent video games drive. Organizers will collect violent video games, throw them in
News
College Faces Backlash Against Homoerotic Art
Facing criticism and threats from hardline Islamists, the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, has shut down an academic journal that published a series of homosexually suggestive paintings. The college pulled the issues from bookstores and dissolved the journal's editorial board, but that
Art
Amazing Posters from Weimar Germany Going Up for Sale
Germany between the two world wars was a time of stunning creativity. Although it saw the rise of Nazism, the Weimar Era also included the flourishing of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Dada in visual art, avant-garde theater by the likes of Bertolt Brecht, German Expressionist films, critic
Opinion
Does a Sculpture of Hitler Belong in the Warsaw Ghetto?
Whether art still has the power to disrupt, offend, and shock is a well-worn topic in the art world. Many of us take it for granted that, as Jennifer Schuessler wrote this past fall in the New York Times, "Shock long ago went mainstream." At heart, though, the question concerns not just an artwork b
Opinion
Get a Piece of Marina Abramović
On eBay right now, you can buy a piece of tape used to mark the position of the visitors' chair for Marina Abramović's epic 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art. That might strike you as a fairly minute and extreme bit of fan ephemera, which it may very well be. But it's also an artwork by M