Opinion
The Problem With Exhibitions About "The Times We Live In"
The noble ambitions of these shows doom them to be listicles, box-ticking exercises struggling to meaningfully speak to the issues of our sociocultural moment.
Opinion
Art
Reimagining Queer Presence in Grand Museum Rooms
A commitment to trans subjects, and their queer communities, is manifested as a holding environment made approachable by our concern, grounded in intimacy and legacy, enfolding any viewer who will stop, listen, and receive love.
Opinion
Why the Elgin Marbles Should Not be Returned to Greece ... Yet
To do so before they have returned the Maqdala treasures and the Benin Bronzes and the Easter Island statues and the Maori heads, before a coherent set of precepts for decolonization has been articulated, would affirm the wrong principle.
History
What Frank Lloyd Wright Can Teach Us About Comfort in the Office
Over a century after Wright designed a workplace that borrowed features from the home, designers are at it again, but who does a homey office really serve?
Opinion
Did Judy Chicago Just Troll Us?
Nowhere in the museums’ advertising blitzkrieg for the performance were we told to bring our wildfire-season masks as well as our covid masks, and covid masks don’t prevent smoke inhalation.
Opinion
An Open Letter to Piotr Bernatowicz, the Director of the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Art
Mr. Bernatowicz, in your introductory text you talk about the need for honesty, the disease of hypocrisy, overreaching governments. You do not fulfill a single one of your own ideals.
Opinion
The Effects of September 11 Traumas, 20 Years Later
There is a debate whether the memory of Little Syria should be seized upon to tell truthful and positive stories about Arabs in the US, or whether any conflation between its history and contemporary politics is inappropriate.
Opinion
How Both Paris Hilton and Martha Rosler Satirize Domesticity
In Cooking with Paris, Hilton capitalizes on her portrayal of being a competent woman, while highlighting its anachronism through her absurd performance. Rosler manipulates the camera in the same way.
Opinion
The Fuzzy Line Between Inspiration and Appropriation
A story about a kidney and the drawing of a knee bring up age-old arguments about plagiarism and appropriation.
Opinion
Seattle Museums Are Artwashing Their Way Back to “Normal”
As long as museums make representational rather than structural changes, they cannot shake off their white supremacist origins.
Opinion
Free the Nipple: A History of a Hidden Movement
While court cases have helped to shape this movement from the 1930s until today, the social-media landscape has generally remained deaf to calls for change.
Opinion
The Myth About Having Children as an Artist
COVID-19 demolished the canard that serious work is incompatible with family life. We can no longer entertain the illusion that raising children requires a total sacrifice of any other endeavor.