Art
Weekend Words: Sign
"When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
Latest
Books
Reader’s Diary: A Philosopher’s Fictions
It’s kind of wonderful when pure chance leads you to a book that unexpectedly illuminates another one you’ve just read.
Art
Elliott Green Can See for Miles and Miles and Miles
Elliott Green has channeled the landscape paintings of the early Northern Song dynasty along with the fantastical landscapes of the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
Art
Robert Mangold’s Sense of Things
For Mangold, more than any other artist of his generation, painting is contingent, rather than self-sufficient. It is part of an active relationship.
Art
To Haunt Us Out of Now
If this kind of wacko fear-mongering is part of the new American norm, I think the best thing art can do is spook us out of this existence.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Craig Stockwell
Painters who lived and exhibited in New England, like Jake Berthot and Porforio DiDonna, are highly represented. They, like Stockwell, have straddled the line between tough material abstraction, nature, and the figure.
Music
Solemnly Dinky High-Camp Bleepy: Chiptune Radio’s ‘Undertale’
Gliding and burbling, ringing and spattering and glitching, a lyrical escapism animates an album whose loveliness and silliness are inextricable.
Performance
Detox, the Musical: Richard Maxwell's 'The Good Samaritans'
Richard Maxwell’s style can be off-putting or self-defeating, yet its virtues are manifest in this piece.
Art
Creature Discomfort: Art in the Cycle of History
It makes sense, at this most critical moment, to take a serious look at the art of the 1980s, its political fury and layered poetics, as an anchor in the storm.
Art
David Reed Did Not Go Along with Those Who Threw the Baby Out with the Bathwater
Making a brushstroke painting in the mid-1970s — a decade after Greenberg, Stella, and Lichtenstein gleefully presided over its burial — was foolhardy and brave.
Books
From Triangle to Tiger, a Handbook for Understanding Symbols
Mark Fox and Angie Wang's Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing is a guide to the evolution of symbolism using 400 examples from art history.
Art
The Emotional Pull of Len Lye's Motion Sculptures
An exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery demonstrates how Lye strove to evoke concrete feelings through fleeting motion.