In Brief
The 116 Photos Carl Sagan and NASA Picked to Share With Aliens
Launched in 1977 by NASA, the Golden Record, a copper phonograph LP, was intended to provide a picture of life on planet Earth to any aliens who might encounter the spacecraft
Latest
News
Discovery in a Cathedral Attic Suggests Birds Are the Best Archivists
Archaeologists restoring a cathedral in Zvenigorod, an old town 40 miles west of Moscow, recently stumbled upon stacks of centuries-old documents hoarded by an unexpected breed of collectors: birds.
Opinion
An Open Letter to Frank Stella on the Occasion of His Whitney Retrospective
Dear Frank Stella, Your object-paintings choke me.
In Brief
A Skull Carved from a Meteorite Lands on the Auction Block
The skull is a universal symbol of mortality, appearing in artworks by everyone from Hans Holbein the Younger and Albrecht Dürer to Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Art
Modeling Life, Death, and Eternity in the Ancient Americas
Miniature mummies carved from wood and carefully wrapped in tiny shrouds overlook a model of a Chimú palace, one of the small-scale representations of a lost precolonial world in Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas.
Comics
Magic Art Supplies
What you wish you had …
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Paris > Beirut, Goya's portraits, robber barons and looting, street art and gentrification, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Stab
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson defended himself this week against charges from the media that he did not try to stab another teenager in his youth.
Art
X Marks the Spot: E. J. McAdams’s Sculptural Nature Writing
Taking its title from a line in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, E.J. McAdams’ site-specific installation, “Trees Are Alphabets,” consists of salvaged sawed-off tree branches, most about seven or eight feet long, sculpturally arranged on the terrace of The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Art
Slip, Sliding Away with John Walker
What do Richard Diebenkorn and John Walker have in common? When they sink their teeth into something, they aren’t likely to let it go.
Interview
Don’t Spook the Horse: Carroll Dunham on His New Work
The odd one out in Carroll Dunham’s current exhibition of paintings at Barbara Gladstone is “Culture as a Verb” (2013-2015). It’s the closest thing Dunham, or anyone in my recent memory, has come to painting the feeling of terrified, paranoid sorrow.
Art
Class Disjunctions: Dutch Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Even to the trained eye, there is something unrelenting about most seventeenth-century Dutch art.