Interview
Painting “Peaceful” Rather Than “Perfect”
LONDON — Regarding the use of photographs in painting, it’s no shortcut, at least not in the work of Ben Johnson.
Latest
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Ferguson, David Hockney and the avant-garde, Francis Bacon's "missing" exhibition, art in a mall, Persian calligraphy, naked in a Yves Klein sculpture, the infamous 19th-century "Ape Woman," and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Climb
Recently, Cliff Bar announced the termination of its sponsorship of five professional rock climbers.
Art
Jasper Johns Refuses to Play by the Book
Currently on view in the exhibition Jasper Johns: Sculptures and Related Paintings 1957–1970 at Craig F. Starr is “Book” (1957), a work I suspect many people either don’t know about or are not likely to have seen, even in reproduction.
Music
Fragments of a Shape
If Shabazz Palaces are the future of rap, as their label claims, then rap is bound for obscurantist whimsy — inventive and engaging though their records are, these proud bohemians have reached such a rarefied level of willful avant-garde perversity that it can take forever to hear how their musical
Art
Neo-Conceptual Process-Revival: Sam Lewitt's 'Casual Encounters'
Sam Lewitt is a young artist in a hurry. He was barely out of his twenties when he scored the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and right now he is filling both outlets of the Miguel Abreu Gallery — the modest space on Orchard Street and the immodest one on Eldridge.
News
New Clue Revealed for a Sculpture of Secret Code at CIA Headquarters
A secret message encoded in a sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, got one step closer to being solved last week.
News
Art Movements
This week in art news: A Cezanne catalogue raisonné was published online for public use, a brutalist structure is to be converted into an arts center, and a watercolor by Adolf Hitler sold for $161,000.
Art
The State of Iberoamerican Folk Art
In 1995, Cándida Fernández de Calderón embarked on a remarkable expedition to support Mexican folk art.
News
German Media May Corroborate $36M Islamic State Antiquities Trafficking
There is significant evidence that illicit antiquities trading contributes to paramilitary funding. It does not happen everywhere, all the time, but it does happen.
Art
Drawing Hemingway's Cuba
James Richards, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, finds anecdotal proof in the life of Ernest Hemingway.
Books
Grappling with a Family Ghost in an Interactive Photography Project
Photographer McNair Evans's faith in his father was rattled when the patriarch died and the secret of the family agricultural business being near insolvency was revealed.