Opinion
Weekend Words: Fraud
"Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent."
Latest
Books
Reader's Diary: Franklin Bruno's 'Armed Forces’
I keep wondering whether it’s really possible to write at length and in depth about this kind of music.
Art
The Wild Children of William Blake
Raymond Foye – who possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of various underground currents of poetry, music, and art – is the only person on the planet who could have conceived of this exhibition, Dark Star: Abstraction and Cosmos at Planthouse.
Art
Conversations Can Be a Way of Moving Forward: Melissa Meyer’s Category-Resistant Abstractions
Since 2001, Melissa Meyer has continued to reinvent herself without severing her connections to Abstract Expressionism or, more particularly, the brushstroke and drawing in paint.
Art
Out of Time: Stephen Greene’s 1960s Abstractions
Visiting the exhibition of Stephen Greene’s paintings from the 1960s at the Jason McCoy Gallery is like hearing a squat black dial telephone ring next to an ashtray holding a freshly lit cigarette, the smoke curling up into a shaft of sunlight.
Books
Beguiling Simplicity: The Poetry of Robert Lax
Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read.
Art
Silence Like a Sense: Jake Berthot’s Visual Poetics
Before Jake Berthot became a painter, he was ridiculed by high school peers for an unorthodox answer he once gave in class. Berthot’s teacher rescued him by saying that the response he’d given made its own kind of sense because the young man was a poet.
Books
Antithetical Poetics: Recent Books by Joseph Donahue
Among contemporary American poets, Joseph Donahue is an underrecognized master. For years, he has been accumulating a prodigious body of work in which a searching vision and a refinement of craftsmanship combine.
Art
Smeary Smeary Edgar Degas
The first picture that caught me up short was “Factory Smoke” (1877–79), hanging alone on a freestanding wall in the middle of the gallery.
Art
Rendering Rhythm and Bodies in 3D
With bursts of neon cones and discs against a black void, clips from graphic artist MELTMIRROR's newest music video suggest what Kandinsky might've come up with had he been able to experiment with 3D modeling.
Film
At Tribeca Film Festival, Experiencing Submersion, Blindness, and Incarceration in VR
The communal experience of watching a film in theaters is a prime part of moviegoing, but at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, solitary visual consumption is receiving ample attention.
News
Art Movements
This week in art news: Long Island City's iconic Pepsi-Cola sign was designated a landmark, the US Senate passed a bill to ban imports of Syrian antiquities, and an underwater robot discovered the sunken Loch Ness Monster model built for Billy Wilder's 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.