The argument is that Beyoncé’s “Formation” is complexity masquerading as simplicity. But it’s also simplicity pretending to be more complicated.
Beyoncé
Posted inPerformance
A Splintered and Sung Exploration of Black Women’s Identities
The title of writer-dancer-artist-choreographer Ralph Lemon’s new production, Scaffold Room, describes equally well the contraption on and around which it’s staged and the way the piece is structured.
Posted inOpinion
Liberté, Égalité, and … Beyoncé
For the days when you don’t feel a sense of brotherhood, there is Beyoncé.
Posted inPerformance
Voguing Andy Warhol in Whiteface
In the early 1980s, Andy Warhol posed in drag for a series of Polaroid portraits. Wearing heavy white makeup in works like “Self-Portrait in Drag” (1981), he exudes a ghoulish glamour.
Posted inMusic
The Legendary Auteur: Deconstructing Pazz & Jop
As the Village Voice’s 41st Pazz & Jop Critics Poll makes clear, Kanye West is the most gifted popular musician of our time. This may sound like empty, generalized hyperbole, and it is. But nothing else would do justice to a man whose renown dwarfs your average celebrity, because West has reached an utterly unprecedented level of acclaim.
Posted inMusic
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (January 2014, Part 2)
In part 2 of this month, reviews of Beyoncé, Blood Orange, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Waxahatchee.
Posted inArt
Getting Punked: Protesting the Met’s Decadent Appropriation
The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has forgotten that clothes and fashion are not art. When you go to see the PUNK: Chaos to Couture exhibit, which opened on May 9 and runs until August 14, you may think you stumbled instead into a luxury couturier’s boutique. The outré fashions are fabulous and gorgeously displayed and there’s some badass soundtrack music by Jayne County, Suicide, and the Sex Pistols, but you can’t try on any of the clothing and in the end, you are only permitted to buy over-priced T-shirts in the gift shop. Dude, I see the couture, but where the hell is the CHAOS?
Posted inOpinion
Beyoncé Art Tumblr?
Gawker has discovered Beyoncé’s tumblelog and writer Caity Weaver thinks it’s art … or something.
