Comics
The Space Between Opportunity and Rejection
I've learned it's better to keep good news to myself ...
Latest
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, global warming and archaeology, Barbie's new looks, Christine Chubbuck's mysterious suicide footage, photos that got a photographer banned from North Korea, drone racing, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Goose
Writing in The New York Times, James Poniewozik boils down Donald Trump's standoff with Fox News to a matter of eggs and geese.
Music
Vince Staples, Fierce Minimalist
Vince Staples’s Summertime ‘06 is the hardest album to hit the rap game in a decade, maybe more.
Art
A Many-Splendored Ode to the Dodo
Absurdity and loneliness embrace each other in David Beck’s diminutive, meticulously detailed dioramas.
Art
Resisting Totality: The Paintings of Zhu Jinshi
A precocious youth forced to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution, the painter Zhu Jinshi afterwards joined the seminal new art group the Stars (星星), producing works that dabbled in the imported medium of abstraction.
Books
“Exactly as It Was”: Ellsworth Kelly’s Basic Training
When art world luminary, Ellsworth Kelly, died in December at the age of 92, his obituaries described him as an artist who rejected the very idea of art as self-expression.
Art
Discourse, Dazzle, and Snap: Jonathan Lasker’s New Paintings
Jonathan Lasker’s approach to painting hasn't changed materially in decades, and so why would his work, which struck me as an alienating (if not irritating) closed system when I first started looking at it in the 1990s, now feel so open, urgent, and fresh?
Art
Highlighting the Invisible Labor of Art Objects
The tension between design and art derives from the utility ascribed to the former vying with the elusiveness that characterizes the latter.
In Brief
Badly Photoshopped Photo Wins Nikon Award and Internet Freaks Out
Hastily photoshopping a graphic of an airplane into a shot of some abstracted architecture could win you a Nikon prize.
News
Art Movements
This week in art news: Jeremy Deller and Fraser Muggeridge raised a smiley face flag over London, the Knoedler forgery trial began with testimony from art world heavy-hitters, and the dissident Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
Art
After Almost 50 Years, an African Arts Journal Adapts to Survive
Although there are grants — and generous individuals — out there in the world of academia ready to support scholarly publishing, funding an academic journal, from its creation to production to ultimate dissemination, is often still a challenge.