Art
The Octopus, a Motif of Evil in Historical Propaganda Maps
Since the 19th century, the motif of an octopus on propaganda maps has represented the inhuman spread of evil, its tentacles grasping for land and power.
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Art
Required Reading
This week, whitewashing ancient history, Alice Neel's Indian-American portrait, taking an online architecture course at Harvard, the birth of global tourism, street libraries and neoliberalism, and more.
Art
Weekend Words: List
"Ye been oure lord, dooth with youre owene thyng Right as yow list."
Books
Humanly Possibilist: David Shapiro’s In Memory of an Angel
Shapiro’s latest book of poetry, In Memory of An Angel, is his first full-length collection in fifteen years
Books
The Five-Star Delight of Driving Across America with Ron Padgett
At the heart of Padgett’s writing is an innocence: he sees everything — no matter how banal or how curious or strange — with the same attentive, innocent eye.
Art
Peter Dreher Paints a Thousand Skulls
Done over a period of more than forty years, the series now numbers more than five thousand. The paintings present viewers with a visual conundrum: they are exactly the same but each one is unique.
Art
The Cowboy’s Dilemma
Daffy Duck turned 80 last month.
Art
Maureen Gallace’s Uneasy Sublime
Gallace’s gorgeous paintings tap into a pervasive national anxiety, an ill-defined feeling of threat coupled with a nagging sense that a bright promise is faltering and may be already gone.
Art
A World Unto Himself: The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers
Even in Segers’ early work, there is a sense of perversity, not with the Modernist goal to épater la bourgeoisie, but in a kind of damn-it-all, Mr. Toad behind-the-wheel sort of way, boop-booping and careering down the road for the sheer pleasure of it.
Art
Toshio Yoshida Emerges from Gutai’s Grasp
Even for viewers familiar with the diversity of art forms cooked up by the Gutai artists and the attitudes that informed them, much of what is on display in this Yoshida show may come as a surprise.
Art
Patricia Satterlee’s Painterly Silence
Satterlee’s paintings, having eluded the categorical distributions of abstract art, are ultimately couched in their own terms, a syntax that can feel a step outside the precincts of language.
Art
From a 16th-Century Book to a Robot-Assisted Performance, Artists Explore the Legend of the Golem
More than 100 golem-inspired artworks are on display at Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.