Book Review
The Unnameable Artists of the Canton Trade System
In a book on Qing-era trade portraitists whose names are lost to history, Winnie Wong shows us how our restless pursuits of authenticity guide us into pitfalls of our own making.
Book Review
Book Review
Ai Weiwei and the Art of Keeping Your Mouth Shut
“On Censorship” offers timely reflections from the dissident artist, whose entire life and career have been marked by state persecution.
Book Review
In “Discipline,” Larissa Pham Explores Predatory Art-World Mentorship
The art critic and former painter reinvents the genre’s well-trod territory in her debut novel, which makes heartbreakingly acute the consequences of teacher-student relationships.
Comics
Frank O’Hara’s Curatorial Eye
Though best remembered for his poetry, O’Hara championed artists like Helen Frankenthaler and organized several shows at the Museum of Modern Art during the Cold War.
Book Review
Before the “Global South,” Indian Modernists Dreamed of Solidarity
Historian Atreyee Gupta unravels the threads of catchall terms like “Global South” to trace the connections between Indian painters and anticolonial figures like Frantz Fanon.
Book Review
Please, No More Disaffected White Girls
Anika Jade Levy’s “Flat Earth” is navel-gazing, ouroboric, masturbatory — a Dimes Square novel for Dimes Square people.
Book Review
The Jazz Pictures the FBI Silenced
Fearing for her safety, Lisette Model buried her photos of artists like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, but a new book reveals them to the world.
Book Review
Chipping Away at the Facade of Mount Rushmore
In “Biography of a Mountain,” author Matthew Davis deftly weaves together interviews and stories that reveal so much more than a linear narrative of the monument’s history.
Book Review
How White Elites Drained Ancient Art of Its Color
The publication of “Chroma” represents an important shift by museums toward recognizing polychromy and its entanglement with white supremacy.
Book Review
Where Would Contemporary Art Be Without Plastic?
A new anthology on plastics in art reveals the philosophical conundrums and contradictions at the heart of a material the world relies on.
Book Review
Claude Cahun’s Survival Guide for the Ages
A new translation of the French artist’s 1930 memoir is a kaleidoscopic collection of dialogues, sketches, and Blakean proverbs.
Book Review
Michelangelo and Titian’s Rivalry That May Never Have Been
William E. Wallace openly uses what he calls “informed imagination” to explore the relationship between the two masters in his new study.