Comics
Creating Alone
Once I saw this experiment testing the effects of solitary confinement on mice.
Latest
Art
Marcel Duchamp Paints the Body Electric
PARIS — A nomadic but steady hand is clearly sensed in Marcel Duchamp's work. He is often an excellent painter. But it is also true that with Duchamp's legacy of conceptually anti-retinal art (and anti-art), there is something so pregnant with free-floating information that it electrifies and upsets
Art
How Selective Enforcement of Illegal Advertising Laws Punishes Creative Activism
The enforcement of city and state law pertaining to graffiti, advertising, and other signage has enormous power to visually shape public space.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, magazine covers and Old Masters, arts funders, perfect writers, economics of art books, the case against Houston art fairs, why books are banned, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Contagious
The Ebola epidemic continues unabated.
Music
Magnum Opus Cycnorum
Swans, led by one Michael Gira, are the only band around right now to combine the abrasive militancy of classic American noise rock with mind-boggling avant-garde imagination.
Art
What the Heck Is Going On in Angela Dufresne’s New Paintings?
In the foreground of the painting, “Dwarf, Goat, Woman, Man and Head” (2014), a young woman in a striped red and blue bikini is standing in a forest, where it has recently snowed, multitasking. She cradles a decapitated head in the crook of her left arm, while, with her right hand, she is about to p
Art
Four Questions About Contemporary Arab Art
I admit to feeling crippled by the New Museum's Here and Elsewhere show. As the first major show of art from the "Arab world" in a New York museum, it stirs a huge well of emotions and frustrations about a topic that needs volumes to unpack.
Art
Objects of Wonder: Paintings and Sculptures by Richard Whitten
Richard Whitten’s paintings are provoking. They refuse to act entirely like paintings but are exceedingly not sculpture. They baffle you with titles in French, German, and Italian, optical illusions, and spatial inconsistencies rendered with mathematical precision.
Art
Never Explain: Vilaykorn Sayaphet’s Painted Memories
It’s great to look at something that makes the experience of looking seem more important than the need to explain what you saw. Vilaykorn Sayaphet’s exhibition Latmanikham & Thongsy at English Kills Gallery offers just such an opportunity.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Todd Bienvenu
Todd Bienvenu’s studio is filled with stacks: art books on the floor, paintings leaning against the wall. Bienvenu’s work deals with omnivorous appetites – for company, pleasure, fun, music.
Art
Strangely Familiar: The Art of the Chinese Album
The Art of the Chinese Album, the outrageously beautiful exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, chronicles nearly 800 years of variations on a hybrid theme: painting and the book, fused into cinematically sequenced images, a meditative synthesis that speaks to our cultural disarray with start