Opinion
Required Reading
This week, sacred Hopi artifacts go on sale in Paris, NYC settles with OWS over damaged library, Gagosian helps Pratt students, Qatar buys a well-known Picasso in the UK, museum layoffs, transgender in comics, and more.
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Opinion
Weekend Words: Garlic
Weekend Words was saddened this week by the news of the death of filmmaker Les Blank. While his best-known movie is probably Burden of Dreams (1982), a behind-the-scenes look at the epic struggles undertaken by visionary German director Werner Herzog in the making of Fitzcarraldo, for the most part
Art
Color Visions: The Sanford Wurmfeld Experience
For many, Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 – 2013 at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery (February 15–April 30, 2013) will be an introduction to an artist, who, according to the art historian William C. Agee, “may well be the best little-known painter in New York today.” There are many reaso
Art
Single Point Perspective: Luigi Ghirri’s Sunsets Stripped
You walk to the end of the pier, drive to the canyon's edge, or stroll down to the beach. Shading your eyes, you peer out across the water or valley to watch the bright disc slide like a gold coin into the horizon’s slot. Appreciative murmurs are heard as the sky darkens. Another end of day.
Art
The Object Is Not an Object: Cubism, Photons and Two by Fours
This week’s news of a major gift of Cubist works — possibly the most important in the world — from Leonard Lauder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art marks a landmark event for New York’s cultural heritage, but it also redirects our attention, however fleeting, on what the movement was about and what
Art
Alien Skins: Experimental Italian Painting of the 1960s
Sometimes the quietest and most unassuming exhibitions turn out to be the most fascinating, if not the strangest. Tucked away on the third floor of Sperone Westwater’s Bowery building, there’s a show titled Post-War Italian Art: Accardi, Dorazio, Fontana, Schifano. That’s it. No jazzy tagline like “
Art
The Golden Age of Times Square Sleaze Is Back
"You're all too young and too clean-cut to remember, but I was a star in the golden age of Times Square sleaze," snears burlesque superstar Tigger-James Ferguson, playing a washed-up Times Square prostitute in my favorite of his performances. That piece kept popping up in my mind while visiting Scot
Art
Guns, Badasses, and Art
Why is the right to buy a gun so profound? Maybe because it's really about the right to be a badass. Black Power, a provocative show up for just six days at the Superchief Gallery at Culturefix, probes the connections between guns, badass characters, and race. With the gun-control conversation ragin
Hyperallergic
Photos from Wednesday Night's After Hours in Times Square with Marco Brambilla
Last Wednesday night, the inaugural edition of the After Hours series kicked off at the Room Mate Grace Hotel lounge in New York's Times Square with a haunting installation by artist Marco Brambilla and an ethereal performance by Cammisa Buerhaus. Co-organized by Times Square Arts and Clocktower Gal
News
Obama Proposes Arts Increases in 2014 Budget
With the release this week of his proposed 2014 fiscal year budget, President Obama has followed through on his campaign promise to increase funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and, in general, to support the arts.
Opinion
Color-Changing Furniture Controlled by Electrical Pulses
Part of choosing to buy an aesthetic object, whether that’s a piece of art, a decorative sculpture, or a provocative furniture item, is committing to living with it. Sure, your Zaha Hadid desk looks amazing, but would you really want to do work on it every day? Into that conundrum comes British desi
Art
A Photographer Captures the Grim Allure of Disaster
Distilling violence into art is a tricky alchemy. Even when done carefully, it can result in a strange brew, leaving some intoxicated and moved by its heady ascetics, others feeling sick and hung-up on its inherent horror, sadness, and trauma. In On Photography, Susan Sontag famously enunciated that