News
Bogarting the Flame: Pratt Students Get a Venue at Bushwick Open Studios
Thanks to further largess from the arts community, Pratt Institute’s Flameproof student exhibition will be coming to Bushwick Open Studios on June 1 and 2.
Latest
Art
Intertextual Healing: Lygia Pape’s "Divisor" Restaged for the First Time in Asia
HONG KONG — The staging of Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance “Divisor” on the streets of Hong Kong was a fantasy I never knew I had, but witnessing it was a dream nonetheless. Presented as part of the current exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, Ghosts, Rebels. Sars, Leslie and the Hong Kong S
Art
The Bermuda Triangle of Art
This may sound like the world’s most overwrought art gag. And, certainly, there is no small irony in critiquing the creative numbness of the art market with pieces that will be sold on that very same market. But William Powhida’s artistic spoofs are so spot on, and his critiques so incisive, it’s ha
Art
Skewering the Egos of Male Artists at Dia:Beacon
Of the 25 artists whose work is currently on view at Dia:Beacon, four of them are women. (And one of those women is half of a husband-and-wife team.) The open, spacious museum just up the river from New York City is beautiful, staid, and a bit, well, male. Even a fantastic three-room installation of
Art
Art Rx
To help you revel in your art going this week, the doctor prescribes some sure bets and encourages you to take some chances, from the last opportunity to see the New Museum's NYC 1993 show to an imaginative theatrical museum performance.
Books
The Hidden Beauty of Disease Under Our Skin
Beneath our sheath of skin is an internal world both vast and complex. While most of us rarely get to see it, these workings of our systems and organs are the daily viewing of pathologists, particularly when it comes to disease. A new book of photography takes us into our own interiors, and shows th
Opinion
The Nazi Ties of Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys is a canonical postwar artist, but was he really as progressive and enlightened as we've come to believe, and as he led us to think? A new biography of the artist, written by German-born Swiss author Hans Peter Riegel, kicks up the age-old debate about the separation of the artist and t
News
Watch Out, Art World: Amazon Is About to Start Selling Art
This day may have been inevitable, but now it's finally here. In its attempt to take over the world — or at least everything that can be bought and sold in the world, Amazon is launching an art gallery.
Art
Did Vermeer's Daughter Paint 20% of His Works?
Imagine for a moment that in the days after Johannes Vermeer’s death in 1675, that his widow Catharina and eldest daughter Maria, sitting in a darkened room of the Vermeer home, conspired to settle their numerous family debts in a secretive way. Owing their baker the largest sum of money, the widow
Art
Why Don't People Get the New Stedelijk?
Dissing the Stedelijk Museum’s new Mels Crouwel–designed wing, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman off-handedly compared the building to a “ridiculous” bathroom tub that suggested to him the sensation of “hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.” On the speed-rail ride back to Paris fr
Art
Can Rectal Realism (and Other 1970s Art) Inspire?
Despite my longtime interest in New York art from the 1970s, I somehow never imagined delving into an artistic process called, quite literally, "rectal realism." However, last week, I found myself in a small room at the Gershwin Hotel at "Fresh Faces from the 1970s" a film screening and discussion,
Interview
The Artist-Filled Shadow Army of World War II
There are many reasons that the US and Allied troops won World War II. One of the more obscure ones may be the 1,100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, aka the Ghost Army.