Art Review
Beverly Semmes’s Feminist Palimpsests
Women’s bodies are a locus for corrosive stereotypes and ebullient individuality in the artist’s sculpture, painting, fashion, and more.
Martha Buskirk
Martha Buskirk is professor of art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art. Her numerous publications include The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art and her most recent book, Is It Ours? Art, Copyright, and Public Interest.
Art Review
Marisol Was Nobody’s It Girl
A retrospective rescues aspects of her career from her long-running reputation as “glamorous girl artist,” including her politics, humor, and sense of self.
Art
Carey Young’s Reflections on the Trappings of Power
In a video installation and photography, Young extends her interrogation of legal institutions and asks viewers to contemplate what lies beyond surface appearances.
Opinion
The NFT Market Feeds Our Obsession With Ownership
Much is lost when cultural forms are understood primarily through the lens of property ownership — whether they are expressed as physical objects or digital code.
Opinion
How the College Art Association Bumbled Fair Use for their Conference Presenters
In preparing for the CAA's conference this month, I was stopped in my tracks by a presenter agreement that required contributors to sign over extensive rights, made no reference to fair use, and put all liability risk on the speakers.
Art
Slavery and the Dehumanization of Modern Life
Through texts and objects, Cameron Rowland illuminates the connection between slavery and the commercial structures that define the global economy today.
Art
Cady Noland's Pathological America
While it would be comforting to dismiss Noland's 1980s and '90s vision of a pathological public sphere as hopelessly dated, unfortunately the opposite is true.
Art
Subversive Color at the Rose Art Museum
WALTHAM, Mass. — To say that painting is having a moment would be ironic – since, despite periodic claims regarding its demise or return, it clearly never went very far away.
Art
Missing Jane Farver
BOSTON — The news of Jane Farver’s death on April 29 came as a complete shock.
Art
The Sad Story of Jumbo the Elephant
MEDFORD, Mass. — Poor Jumbo. In P.T. Barnum’s hands he became the most famous African elephant in the world — lure to throngs of circus visitors and unknowing shill for countless products. His outsized fame, undimmed by his premature demise, has much to tell us about the rise of a celebrity-driven e
Art
Bit Rot: The Limits of Conservation
Bad things can happen to almost any art. Casino impresario Steve Wynn famously stuck an elbow through his Picasso while bragging about the high price he was about to get for his trophy canvas, and a clumsy visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum managed to trip on a staircase and take out a whole row of i
Art
Marc Jancou, Cady Noland, and the Case of the Authorless Artwork
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Ending not with a bang but a whimper, the last bit of legal wrangling in the case that pitted collector Marc Jancou against Cady Noland and Sotheby’s was quietly settled on November 11.