Film
Fire of Love Captures a Literally Volcanic Romance
Married volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft took incredible footage of eruptions. Sara Dosa’s documentary uses it to tell their unusual love story.
Review
Art
Freedom in Body and Water
Sama Alshaibi’s Four Series draws on historical sources, contexts, and techniques to articulate the definitions and exploitations of freedom.
Art
Delicately Balancing Psychoanalysis and Art History in a Van Gogh Exhibition
Popular perceptions of van Gogh are often preoccupied with heart-wrenching accounts of mental illness, but Van Gogh: Self Portraits avoids speculative psychoanalytic readings of one tortured face after another.
Art
The Films of Jonas Mekas Are More Often Discussed Than Seen
A vigorous advocate for the avant-garde, the filmmaker often neglected to promote himself.
Art
Mungo Thomson's Elegies to an Analogue World
Thomson's videos conjure up the weird sublimity of internet wormholes, the familiar, swaddling mindlessness of allowing oneself to be swept up in a deluge of content and carried — where?
Art
There's Something Special About Jim Osman's Sculpture
Osman’s care for and attention to his modest materials, the particularities of their identity, is rare in a society where excess is celebrated daily.
Art
Joy and Terror Coexist in Vian Sora's Unsettling Paintings
The capacity to reside in joy and terror in equal measure gives Sora's paintings their unsettling power, a brutal acknowledgment that creation coexists with destruction.
Art
Tate's Survey of Caribbean-British Art Centers Britain
By the end of Life Between Islands, the island that is centered in this exhibition is Britain, and “the Caribbean” remains a loose, ill-defined, hazy backdrop
Books
Can Poetry Make a Difference?
Contemporary politically committed poets have made a cottage industry of agonizing over the question of whether their Leftist bona fides actually make any difference.
Art
Why Is a Virtual Veronese Artwork at a Physical Museum?
To play devil’s advocate, you could argue that eventually technology will be so good that everyone will have VR, and there is no need to travel to the National Gallery at all to see art.
Art
Brad Kahlhamer and the Amalgamations of Existence
Relationships, not isolation, inform Kahlhamer’s ideas of identity
Film
Letting a Dairy Cow’s Life Speak for Itself
In her documentary Cow, Andrea Arnold avoids anthropomorphism, instead trying to present the world as her main character sees it.