Art
Getting to Know the Artisans Who Make Other People's Art
We don’t often see these people listed on press releases or wall placards, but it’s thanks to their work that we get to have meaningful aesthetic experiences.
Latest
Interview
Meet Moiety, North Williamsburg's Newest Gallery
Has Williamsburg's supercharged gentrification cycle come full circle and spurred a new influx of galleries? How else to explain the opening of two new art galleries in the neighborhood in the last two months?
Comics
Holiday Baking with Art History
Perhaps we all need new cookie cutters.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, JR's eyes in #BlackLivesMatter protest, Republicans and torture, museums and big data, saving Wikipedia, the meaning of graffiti in ancient Rome, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Red
This week, attention returned to the red planet, where the robotic rover Curiosity sent back evidence of long-vanished rivers and lakes — and potentially life — on Mars.
Books
Making Muses: Dorothy Iannone's Erotic Art Was Inspired by Dieter Roth
Dorothy Iannone describes her trip to Reykjavík in 1967 as the “journey which seems to have made all other journeys possible.” It was there she met the artist Dieter Roth, with whom she swiftly fell in love and for whom she left her husband and a comfortable life in the United States.
Art
Some Follow-up Thoughts on Michael Mazur (1935–2009)
In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, Pat Steir, at the Boston University Art Gallery, John Stromberg opens his essay, “Michael Mazur: A Delicate Balance” with this sentence: “Michael Mazur’s path to his recent paintings based on Chinese art has bee
Art
Stop and Smell the Smoke: El Greco and His Houdini Most High
El Greco came back from the dead. "The Greek," his real name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, moved to Venice and Rome before finally settling in Toledo, where he became one of Spain's most well known painters.
Art
Absolutely Modern: Robert Motherwell on Paper
In 1950, when the painter Robert Motherwell invented the phrase "The School of New York," he summed up its mission as "an activity of bodily gesture serving to sharpen consciousness."
Art
André Robillard Takes Aim at Cast-off Junk — and the Stars
In Europe, the self-taught French artist André Robillard is one of the best-recognized practitioners of this kind of art-making, although his achievements are still not so well known in the US, even among aficionados of outsider or self-taught art.
Books
A Portrait of the 21st-Century Alps, Where Glaciers Retreat and Concrete Advances
The Alps today are different mountains from when the first 19th-century photographers hoisted heavy plate cameras up their craggy sides. Glaciers are in retreat, ski resorts are firmly lodged into slopes, and human infrastructure crawls back and forth steadily up their inclines.
News
Significant 13th-Century Complex Bombed in Syria
Al-Sultaniyah Madrasa, established in 1223 and containing the tomb of Sultan Saladin's son Sultan Malik al-Zaher, appears to have been destroyed. And it seems to have been military rather than sectarian destruction.