Review

Film

The Documentary Project That's Followed the Same Subjects for Over 50 Years

63 Up is the latest installment in the Up series, which has revisited a set of British people every seven years since they were children, tracking their lives and development.

Art

Consciousness, Conflict, and Contradiction in the Art of Robert Colescott

After viewing Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott — the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective to date — it feels fair to assume that factions of society still aren’t ready for Colescott.

Performance

Mourning through Performance, or Performative Mourning?

At Performa, Huang Po-Chih and Su Hui-Yu each staged theatrical productions concerning collective mourning and memorialization. Yet while Su built upon his own relationship to a story of loss, Huang seemed to impose himself upon someone else’s.

Art

LaToya Ruby Frazier Looks Beyond Blue-Collar Stereotypes

In The Last Cruze, the artist hones in on the vast inequities that persist in US society, as well as the tender relationships that enable survival and persistence in spite of them.

Art

Hank Willis Thomas Opens Up Space for Interpretation, Which Is Sometimes Risky

When we have more opportunity to interact with art on our own terms, there are more places to hide from its difficult truths, particularly viewers who have the privilege to do so.

Art

An Artist's Radiographic Photos Cast New Light on Chernobyl

Anyone willing to view Alice Miceli's Projeto Chernobyl on its own terms, to see radiography as both a practical tool and a potential art form, will be richly rewarded.

Art

What Vincent van Gogh Meant to the German Avant Garde

Making Van Gogh: A German Love Story is an heroic effort to salvage Vincent van Gogh’s great artistic intensity from the much hyped, romantic image of the artist as a doomed interloper.

Performance

Staging a History of Violence

Schaubühne Berlin vividly adapts the author Édouard Louis’s first-person account of the experience of rape and attempted murder.

Music

Four Approaches to Sonic Immersion

When the world encroaches, aural blankets are comforting, but they can also function as weapons.

Books

Giorgio de Chirico's Dream-like Verse

These poems channel the artist's restlessness and longings into uncanny, animated visions.

Art

Are We Prepared to Look Seriously at de Chirico?

I want to resist any temptation to interpret these pictures, to reveal ‘meanings,’ instead of acknowledging the ways they underscore the strangeness of the workaday world.

Art

When the West Dreamt of Odalisques

Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art is a giant teaching aid of a fairly solid and dependable kind, but one that does not quite push far enough.