Opinion
Required Reading
This week, the Pope in the Sistine Chapel, logo ripoffs, art's connection to OxyContin, Saudi Arabia's destruction of Yemeni cultural heritage, gender disparity in the art world, and more.
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Opinion
Weekend Words: Space
"While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years."
Books
Reader's Diary: ‘Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy’
No one writes letters anymore, but I still like reading them — especially when both sides of a correspondence are collected between two covers. No narrative, no argument — just the mercurial yet implicit unity of a relationship. Still, I’m not sure why I picked up this book.
Books
Piercing Clarity: Gail Mazur’s Poetry
Aptly titled, Forbidden City is Gail Mazur’s seventh book of poetry. Before getting the book — which she sent me — I knew that Gail had written the poems in the years after her husband, Michael Mazur (1935–2009), had died of congestive heart failure.
Art
The Fly in the Ointment: Lee Krasner
One view of Lee Krasner’s career is that there is no dramatic rupture marking the emergence of something new — at least not like the widely celebrated ones that occurred in the work of her husband, Jackson Pollock, or with Willem de Kooning, or, later, Philip Guston.
Art
Georgia on My Mind
O’Keeffe was different: she lived far away in a sun-baked universe. She was mysterious. She’d been married to Alfred Stieglitz and had maintained her identity and independence. She painted bones.
Music
Prince, Rock Hero
What did Prince mean?
Art
The Resistance of Jane Irish
Instead of filling the heavens with angels and Christian saints, Irish paints predominantly Rococo rooms in which the ceilings are populated with anti-war protestors, political figures such as Lyndon Johnson, and Vietnam War veterans.
Art
Never Mind the Bollocks, It’s the Met’s Breuer Now
I realize that I’m coming late to the party with Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, one of the three debut exhibitions of the Met Breuer, and I have little to add to the conversation about the fundamental problem with the show.
Art
At Spring Masters, a Glimpse of Precious Artworks Before They Change Hands
The Spring Masters fair preview welcomed its visitors with vases full of fresh magnolias, live classical music, and platters of champagne.
Art
A Psychedelic Garden Blooms with CGI Cyborgs
Just when it seemed like the psychedelic music video trend was getting old, Japanese artist Kota Yamaji’s video for tilt-six’s track "あなくろノイズ" has come along to melt your head.
Art
Tracing the Contours of Power at the Marrakech Biennale
MARRAKESH — In the vaults adjacent to the city's Koutoubia Mosque, a video by the Copenhagen-based artists' group Superflex tells the story of migrants and refugees eager to reach Europe.