Opinion
Required Reading
This week, the Sochi Olympics look a lot like art, the internet has a style guide, art history of slavery in Canada, 101 female artists got Wiki pages recently, who benefits from NEA grants, and more.
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Opinion
Weekend Words: Winter (2014 Edition)
A year ago, Weekend Words gave winter its due. After the week we've had, a revisit seemed in order, this time an all-poetry tribute.
Books
The Scientific Artist: On Reading Michel Houellebecq
I can think of no better way to frame a brief introduction to Houellebecq’s work (still largely unfamiliar to Americans) than to structure it around a tension between analysis and lyricism.
Art
Richard Baker Kicks Out the Jams
For the past decade, Richard Baker has developed two distinct but related bodies of work, one in oil and the other in gouache: the oil paintings depict tabletops covered with all sorts of printed ephemera and bric-a-brac; the gouaches are of book covers and, more recently, record covers.
Art
Enamored Magicians: The Hermetic World of Jess and Robert Duncan
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle presents a slice of the rich Northern California art world of the postwar years. Much of what is here is not “gallery art,” in a commercial sense, but art created by and for a small community of friends, colleagues, and lovers, rooted in
Music
Vampire Weekend's Formal Coup
Swiping tunes from all over the place and sampling everything from hip-hop to hippie folk, the new Vampire Weekend album demands exegesis.
Art
Points of Contact: Small Works, Giant Steps
The Age of Small Things, a group show organized by the painter Chuck Webster, fills the ground floor of the Lower East Side’s Dodge Gallery, where the singular touch of the artist-curator has recast a parade of diminutive objects into an unpredictable unfolding of processes and ideas.
Art
Kill Your Phone: Artist Targets Surveillance
A Berlin-based conceptual artist artist, Aram Bartholl, has published a website to assist the craft-inclined and surveillance-averse in the making of their own Faraday cage pouch for their cellular telephones.
Art
The Political Weight and Forgotten Creativity of Postwar Polish Film
Scorsese has recently organized a series, Masterpieces of Polish Cinema, comprised of 21 pristine digital restorations of Polish films released between 1957 and 1987.
Art
Keith Sonnier's Tactile Formulations in Neon and Glass
Relatively speaking, Keith Sonnier’s interest in the connections between nature and technology has a long history. His early minimal-style, classical neons from 1968–1970 have a highly reductive, classical, nearly stoic appearance. The more recent formulations, though extravagantly tactile, were les
Art
Back When the Olympics Had Art Competitions
From 1912 to 1948, awards were given out for works of art in roughly five different categories — architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture — for artworks inspired by sport.
Art
Sochi, Arshile Gorky, and the Winter Olympics
While the world is watching the XXII Winter Olympic opening ceremonies in Sochi, Russia, I thought it would be an interesting time to explore one of the most famous mentions of Sochi in art, Arshile Gorky's Garden in Sochi series (1938–42).