Opinion
Required Reading
This week, women in street art, the worst waiter in history, art market bubble, a broken Picasso plate, reviewing Chipotle lit, the capitalist imagination, immigration stats, letters in words, and more.
Latest
Art
Adventures in Styrofoam, Maximalism, and Photography During Bushwick Open Studios 2014
Stepping off the L at the Morgan stop on Friday afternoon, the first thing I saw was two girls lugging giant canvases across the platform; just outside, there’s a pair of white humanoid busts surrounded by cans of spray paint, seemingly inviting passerby to contribute. The main event may be over the
Opinion
Weekend Words: Cash
This week the Guardian reported that a Dutch man who received brain implants to treat "a severe form of obsessive compulsive disorder" has developed "a sudden and powerful love for the music of Johnny Cash."
Music
The Legendary Auteur: Deconstructing Pazz & Jop
As the Village Voice’s 41st Pazz & Jop Critics Poll makes clear, Kanye West is the most gifted popular musician of our time. This may sound like empty, generalized hyperbole, and it is. But nothing else would do justice to a man whose renown dwarfs your average celebrity, because West has reached an
Art
With Mouths Wide Open: Guy Goodwin’s America
In her glowing review of Guy Goodwin’s previous exhibition at Brennan & Griffin, which appeared in the New York Times on March 8, 2012, Roberta Smith suggested that Goodwin belonged to the “tradition of raucous American abstraction,” which began with “Stuart Davis and George Sugarman.”
Art
Standouts from 17-17 Troutman During Bushwick Open Studios 2014
From hard-edge geometric abstraction to messy paintings to video works and photography, the range of the output was vast, and the quality often surprising. Though crowds were thinner than at the centrally-located 56 Bogart, which offers strong galleries but weaker studios, 17-17 Troutman remains a v
Art
Behind-the-scenes of Bushwick Art at 56 Bogart
Crowds flocked this Saturday to 56 Bogart Street, one of the main stops on the Bushwick Open Studios circuit.
Art
From Surface to Air at Two Bushwick Galleries
The soapbox derby is fine-tuned American nostalgia (or was it tradition?), a rugged pursuit combining patrilineal bonding with the values of shopworn ingenuity and competition.
Art
Before the Studios Open: Friday Night Shows at Bushwick Open Studios
Opening night of the 2014 Bushwick Open Studios took place on a cool May night, and thousands of people were bouncing between art spaces, bars, restaurants, and private studios to meet friends, share stories, and talk about how much the neighborhood has changed.
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (May 2014, Part 2)
In part 2 of this month, reviews of Drive-By-Truckers, The Hold Steady, and Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars.
Art
Quattrocento on the Bowery: The Collaborative Art of George Schneeman
Perhaps the most prolific exemplar of free-spirited collaboration from the New York art scene of the 1960s was the painter George Schneeman, the unofficial artist-in-residence of the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church from its earliest days.
Art
Nothing as It Seems: John Avelluto’s Unrelenting Emptiness
John Avelluto’s artworks — we’ll call them paintings for the sake of convenience — take trompe l’oeil places it was never meant to go. By turns exercises in mind-boggling craft and mind-twisting formalism, they repeatedly abrade the boundary between the hyperreal and the micro-minimal with their tou