Art
Revealing Your Inner Selfie
CHICAGO — Selfies are private moments made available for public consumption. When the shutter snaps, the subject realizes that they're ready to admit something about themselves that would otherwise remain hidden.
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Five Stories of Art Saved from War's Annihilation
The greatest casualty of war is always human life, and there's no doubt that a saved painting can't account for a lost life. Yet the preservation of culture in wartime prevents a total loss of what gave a place its spirit and meaning.
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Patrick Strzelec’s Sculptures Are in the Middle of an Improbable Thought
In drawing, a line need not become a contour or an image. In sculpture, this resistance to becoming is harder to pull off. For all their insistence on pure abstraction, Donald Judd makes boxes and Richard Serra makes steel fortresses. The problem is that this kind of sculpture smacks of signature sh
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Single Point Perspective: Munk and Me
In Loren Munk’s painting "An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg, 1981-2008” (2008-2011), I recognized a slice of my own history in a place I had known well. After a lifetime of looking at paintings, this experience was oddly new to me.
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Great Outdoors: The Biennial of the Americas in Denver
In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard envisions the house as a "vertical being," with two symbolic poles: the irrationality of the cellar and the rational consciousness of the roof. “Up near the roof, all our thoughts are clear … Here we participate in the carpenter’s solid geometry.” The same can b
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How to Photoshop the Tourists Out
After seeing this image floating around the internet that promised the ability to "delete tourists from your travel photos," I felt compelled to fact check the claim.
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An Exhibition Looks at Art that Has Been Physically Attacked
This fall the Tate Britain is opening an exhibition on art that has been physically attacked in the country, whether for political, religious, or personal reasons, or just because the artist was into destruction.
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NYC Parks Welcome Student Artists
We may admire the mathematical formulae of analytic cubism, stand in awe before a serene Raphael, or tilt our heads in bemusement at one of Jeff Koons’s inflatable lobsters. But sometimes the most affective and accessible art is made by non-artists — by amateurs and children. Unassuming and genuine,
Art
A Midsummer Group Show Dream
CHICAGO — As we settle into midway-through-summer mode here in the city that does sleep sometimes, we spend more time hanging at the beach, BBQing with friends and generally chillaxing. With this slowing down of general movement comes the proliferation of — wait for it! — the summer group show.
Art
Sculpture that Just Wants to Play
Some curious creatures have arrived in City Hall Park, although they look pretty miserable about it. Olaf Breuning's "The Humans," with its loop of anthropomorphic figures showing a story of humans evolving from fish to fisher king, has each whimsical figure sporting a deep frown upon their marble f
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The Inner Life of a Museum
Jem Cohen’s new feature film, Museum Hours, unfolds like a series of postcards from a lonely traveler, fresh with the pressure of on-site writing while calculating that the memory will be received miles and days away. Shooting primarily in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cohen’s foreign camera se
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Teaching a Robot to Paint
We're fascinated with robots doing human things, from Elektro chain-smoking its way through the 1939 World's Fair to the Turk automaton that was beating people at chess during the 18th and 19th centuries (there turned out to be a human hiding inside the latter, but still). Now a team at the Universi