Art
Inside the Christian Pockets of the Middle East
In the United States, Canada or Europe, where Christians form the religious majority, it's strange to consider parts of the world where they are not only uncommon, but also persecuted.
Latest
Books
Letters of Woe and Curses Returned with Stolen Pieces of the Petrified Forest
The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park.
Art
Can Computers Interpret Art?
Novice Art Blogger records the impressions of a computer encountering abstract and representational art from the Tate's digitized collection for the first time.
Comics
The Art of Adaptation
I've been told I should get out more.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, learning from Skymall's surrealism, Berlin's memorials, Orientalism in Montreal, BIG in DC, Renzo Piano in Paris, Japanese memes mocking ISIS, the influence of Joseph Beuys on Abramović, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Predict
If you want to work out the kinks in predicting the weather, the Old Farmer's Almanac offers a number of folk remedies you can try.
Art
Jeff Koons: Shiny on the Outside, Hollow on the Inside, Part 2
I wrote most of the first two sections of this essay (Part 1) in March 2011, but never submitted it anywhere. I think I lost interest in the subject. I thought I wrote it well before the negative critiques would surely come rolling in, even before Koons’s retrospective at the Whitney in 2014.
Art
An Extraordinary Studio Artist in a Post-Studio Era
As I have written previously, there is a lot of very good painting going on these days. It is just that you are not likely to see much of it at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at least in recent memory.
Music
Azealia Banks Jumps Up and Down
A sizzling keyboard riff slides out of nowhere and bounces around for a few seconds before a metallic snare drum comes in and a woman starts rapping.
Art
Enigmas of the Visible: Paintings by Anne Tabachnick
We usually describe seeing an object by using the past tense: "I saw." The emphasis on its foreclosed quality can make us forget how open-ended seeing is. The dynamism of a seen object is every bit as charged as our bodies' initial physiological responses to it.
Art
Jeff Koons: Shiny on the Outside, Hollow on the Inside, Part 1
Shiny on the outside, hollow on the inside. That is how the work of the American artist, Jeff Koons, has been generally described and received, not only by those who are less than affectionate toward it but also by those who like it.
Art
Reading David Foster Wallace for the Colors
DETROIT — When a tweet from @CorrieBaldauf breaks into your Twitterstream, it is captivating and disorienting for a number of reasons. More often than not, she is live-tweeting her progress through her latest iteration of the Infinite Jest Project, an exercise in literature, obsession, and social me