Art
Study: Mice Prefer Kandinsky to Mondrian
A recent study shows that mice can indeed have preferences to paintings, given the proper morphine reinforcement.
Latest
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, the Venice Biennale makes the art world go round, a new accessibility icon, Starry Night explained, Warhol inspired Dior, James Turrell overload, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Crash
Weekend Words looks at crashes past with an eye toward a crash-free future.
Art
Brave Heart: The Recent Paintings and Drawings of Mark Greenwold
Ever since Mark Greenwold first began exhibiting in 1979, a lot of gibberish has been written about his highly detailed, modestly scaled oil paintings of disquieting domestic situations. One critic, willfully forgetting that there is a difference between fact and fiction, viciously attacked his firs
Art
Thomas Nozkowski and Philip Guston Talk to Each Other Without Knowing It
Thomas Nozkowski wasn’t thinking about Philip Guston’s “Untitled” (1980) while he was working on “Untitled (9-21)” (2012), but the number of formal attributes they share — from size to composition and imagery — has proven hard for me to ignore. It was while I was looking at Nozkowski’s “Untitled (9-
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Julie Heffernan
I met Julie Heffernan this past fall at a party she hosted celebrating the wedding of another painter, and was taken by her, the community of (women) artists who were gathered, and her painting over the dining table. It was the fierceness of the vision that attracted me, and the individuality of her
Books
Luminous Loss: Karen Green's "Bough Down"
At the start of Karen Green’s prismatic first book, Bough Down, it is June. “Does it begin like this?” she writes, and describes in glittering prose a pastoral arrangement of household objects: garden hose, cigarettes, fuzzy pills, artichoke stalks. The items seem innocent enough until they become i
Art
Bridge to Nowhere: Matthew Barney’s Drawings
The elaborately baroque art of Matthew Barney puts some people off, and I count myself among them. His Olympian athleticism, symbol-laden costume dramas and obsession with petroleum jelly can be fascinating, but they can also feel chilly and remote.
Art
Graveyard People: Photographs of the Beautiful Dead
The art of memorial sculpture has by its nature an emotional resonance due to its role in honoring the dead, but there's a living, human beauty to it as well. It's these aspects of cemetery sculpture that Italian photographer Mattia Mognetti captures in his 2013 Graveyard People series.
Performance
Coming Soon: Basquiat the Musical
First, there was Leonardo the Musical, a mostly fictional production about Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa. Then there was the three-hour-long Starry Nights, about, yes, Vincent van Gogh. Next came Pop!, a piece of "canned camp," as the New York Times called it, focused on Andy Warhol and the Fa
Art
The Top 10 Art Documentaries to Watch on Netflix Instant
I like to think of the mythical Netflix Marathon as the process of accumulating inspiration, but it could be more realistically dubbed procrastination. Either way, it has become a talent I’ve honed to perfection, one that I desperately need to figure out a way to work into my résumé.
News
Michigan Attorney General Says Detroit Art Collection Can't Be Sold
The battle over the future of the Detroit Institute of Arts' collection is still only a theoretical one, but that hasn't stopped high-profile people throughout the state from taking sides. The latest entrant into the fray is Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who says the art cannot be sold to