Art
The Sordid Irony of a Pro-Trump Art Show
People thought #DaddyWillSaveUs was satire; it was, instead, the dismayingly self-serious House of Trump Art.
Essays
Art
Hurricane Frank: Rhetorical Abstraction in the Age of the Incidental Viewer
If Frank Stella’s ambition and insatiable visual voracity were exhilarating at first, the paintings’ often overbearing size and physicality also left the viewer, time and again, with the unsettling feeling of being wrestled to the ground.
Art
The Alluring Fiction of Los Angeles as a Resurgent Art Center
It had been 10 years since I had lived here and five years since I had last visited, and I was invited back by way of a press tour. The trip reminded me of what I had forgotten.
Art
As Bushwick Open Studios Shifts Gears, Who Gets Left Behind?
Arts in Bushwick kicked off a more studio-centric program last weekend with a 300-artist exhibition and the release of Making History Bushwick, a nearly 500-page book telling the organization’s story and showcasing work by hundreds of local artists.
Art
In the Face of White Male Privilege Run Amok, a Plea for Artistic Responsibility
ST. LOUIS — What does accountability look like in a world where no one is accountable?
Art
The Rise and Fall of the East Village Lenin Statue
When I first started hanging out in the East Village in the mid-1970s, it was loaded with unofficial monuments to an older Lower East Side: Boarded up Yiddish theaters and a largely unused bocce ball court on Houston Street were reminders of the days when an immigrant community flourished.
Art
When Mark Rothko and Clark Gable Shared a Stage
PORTLAND, Oregon — Mark Rothko was born 113 years ago on September 25, 1903.
Art
Coping with a Conference About Art, Ritual, and Grieving
DETROIT — Despite the conference featuring some of the Detroit’s leading thinkers and most innovative practitioners discussing a compelling topic — the intersection of art and ritual — I felt deeply ambivalent about attending.
Art
Longing for Keith Haring’s Lighthearted Penises
It may seem unusual to uphold a book of penis drawings as a significant art-historical moment, but Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks creates an unignorable link between Haring’s early work and his homosexuality.
Art
Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison’s Collaborative Visions of Harlem
CHICAGO — Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison, two of the 20th century's most celebrated artists, shared a vision of what it meant to be black in the US.
Art
How Trump Trades on Nostalgia for a Mythic White America
Racist sentiments often coexist with a mythologized past of a pure America inhabited only by white Christian people.
Art
An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'
The spectacle can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser.