Comics
The Other Job of an Artist
The life of an artist is always more complicated.
Latest
Art
Required Reading
This week, a new (and more accurate) world map, the death of iconic images, meme warfare, the impact of Brexit on art, and more.
Art
Weekend Words: Vote
"The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all."
Books
Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten's ‘Questions of Poetics’
What is “language writing” anyway?
Books
The Great Kenward
Kenward Elmslie published his poems in Poetry magazine in 1960, and his first book, Pavilions, came out in 1961. Between then and now makes more than fifty years of work. And yet, in some ways, his writing cannot quite be contained by such definitions as “poetry” and “fiction.”
Art
Paintings We Need
In an era that celebrates celebrity, vulgar loudmouths, puerile provocateurs, selfie-addicts, and excessive materialists, Merlin James prefers subtlety over din, less rather than more.
Art
Signs of a Presidential Loser
Nina Katchadourian's "Monument to the Unelected" gives us a chance to consider what it means to be a loser in our electoral system.
Books
In a New Photobook, Stirring Memories of Man on the Moon
The Moon 1968-1972, an attractive new book containing photos from NASA’s Apollo Program, which 47 years ago landed the first men on the moon, evokes the rich mixture of emotion, yearning and speculation that have long surrounded Earth’s mysterious companion and neighbor.
Interview
Lines of Thought: An Interview with Ben Jones
Last month, Ben Jones exhibited a new body of work at The Hole gallery on the Lower East Side. The gallery’s walls and floor are painted a bright, startling white; Jones’s artwork, usually drenched in hot hues, here consists only of graphite-colored oil-stick line drawings.
Performance
Home Alone, With a Few Pills: Franz Xaver Kroetz's 'Request Concert'
With its task-based script, Request Concert may remind some of Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, tightly shot inside a small apartment. The pairing of everyday housework with suicide might also call to mind Marsha Norman's 1983 play 'Night Mother.
Art
Mary Carlson’s Favorite Demons
What does evil look like?
Art
Kate Levant’s Invisible Systems
Simultaneously sparse and immersive, Valerian Dials for Trembling Hands evokes the stillness of an ocean after a shipwreck or storm.