Comics
Art, Love, and Smoking
I made a silly drawing of Dave Hickey & Joni Mitchell smoking 20 ft. from a doorway.
Latest
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, CATS in the London tube, Shriver's cultural appropriation heard around the world, Clinton's white supremacy explainer, normalizing Trump, Gawken, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Stair
"History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below."
Books
Reader’s Diary: Denis Johnson's ‘Jesus’ Son’
Reflected in sentences of throbbing beauty, the blind urge to self-destruction becomes a visionary quest
Art
A Different History
The title of the painting I had been looking at, “Adam and Eve and the Goats” (2016), surprised me. I had thought it was retelling of a classical myth, a subject that Kyle Staver has explored with verve and humor before.
Art
A Heap of Broken Bodies
I want to start my review of Endymion: Recent Paintings by Clintel Steed at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects/SHFAP with a statement the artist made to Jennifer Samet in an interview that appeared on her blog, "Beer with a Painter."
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Katherine Bradford
“Jen! Welcome to Maine!” Katherine Bradford exclaims brightly as she spots me crossing the street.
Music
How Do Rock Heroes Sing?: Beyoncé, Rihanna, and the Megastar Vocal Style
The relevant split isn’t rock vs. pop (both are “pop” artists) but expressive vs. functional, always the key distinction in how pop music presents itself.
Books
Testing Form: Novels by Alejandro Zambra and Matías Celedón
Solely in geographical terms, Chilean culture has issued forth from a matrix of constraint. The Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada remarked that “Chile is perhaps the most poorly located and poorly shaped nation on the planet.
Books
The Secret Life of Infrastructure: Lynn Saville’s 'Dark City'
Realism is the default mode for street photography — in New York, anyway — so it is impressive when a photographer transcends the genre by embracing the attributes and effects of a different approach.
Art
Sending Collage Down a Rabbit Hole
If you’re looking for clues to the dizzying imagery of Tim Spelios’s collages, you’re not going to get very far.
Books
The Fantastic Fall of a Boisterous and Beloved Gilded Age Artist
In one of the many licentious anecdotes from Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic, the Gilded Age artist throws a party in his Gramercy Park "House of Fantasy" so raucous that his neighbors across the street — who happen to be painter George Bellows and his family — call the cops.