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A Kid's Book for Adults Tells the Truth About Death
Everybody dies — that's both a truism and the name of new book by Ken Tanaka with David Ury, who may or may not be the same person.
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What Is an Object?
Before even opening The Object, Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press’s latest installment in the Documents of Contemporary Art series, the book’s title stares back, interpolates itself, asking questions: What is an object? Which object?
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Portraits of Famous Artists with Their Little-Known Quirks
Did you know that the Chupa Chups lollipop logo was designed by Salvador Dalí? Or that Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime, despite the fact he created hundreds of works? James Gulliver Hancock has compiled these facts both familiar and strange into illustrated portraits of the a
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The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut
Drawings by Kurt Vonnegut long kept in storage are getting the monograph treatment with a new publication of his playful, line-driven art. Kurt Vonnegut Drawings, coming next month from the Monacelli Press, features 145 selections of his work.
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Taking Identity to the Guillotine with Yinka Shonibare MBE
Yinka Shonibare MBE's decapitated mannequins in their vibrant batik fabric outfits cavort through a collage of influences that the British-born, Nigeria-raised artist has excavated from the complicated history of culture.
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The Sick World of Kim Hyesoon
The body is a sick place. Its reality is viscera. Kim Hyesoon’s poems are composed of these unsightly and unpleasant viscera. They squirm, blind and deaf like newborn puppies, then grow up and live in a dog-eat-dog world. This world is called Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream.
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Hundreds of Years of Data Growing on Trees
While data visualization can seem like a modern design focus, it really has its roots in the High Middle Ages when a sudden rise in information and population resulted in the need to convey ideas in an accessible way.
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Collaging Imagery from the Delirious Confusion of Finnegans Wake
James Joyce's 1939 Finnegans Wake notoriously starts out with this linguistic monstrosity thundering the fall of Adam and Eve …
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Photographing Ancient Organisms Before They Disappear
Brooklyn-based photographer Rachel Sussman spent nearly a decade tracking down the elders of our world, where life is measured in centuries instead of years.
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Duh, It’s Postmodern Poetry
Jon Rutzmoser’s thin book of poetry packed with thick descriptions of dicks, dire and dramatic Oedipal complexes, heavy-petting psychoanalytic theory references, and Disneyland descriptors made me laugh, pissed me off, had me rolling my eyes, and had me wondering what it means to write poetry today.
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The Portrait in the 21st Century
The National Portrait Gallery in London has published a compendium of what portraiture means for the 21st century. While the media may be more tech-heavy than previous centuries, the examination of self remains, perhaps with even more questions of what that means than before.
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Art of Darkness: Matt Kish Illustrates Conrad's Classic
What’s stunning about Matt Kish’s illustrations for Heart of Darkness — one for every page of Joseph Conrad’s text — is how sunny they are. His modest palette comprises yellow, green, black, and white, with the occasional hit of red, orange, or blue. The novel, on the other hand, is tonally dark: se