Art
Yu Hong's Fantastical Universe of Sorrow
In the Chinese artist's monumental paintings, babies sleep in hell and faceless crowds slump in despair, illustrating the Buddhist world of Saha, where all beings suffer.
Review
Art
The Artistic Explosion in Turn-of-the-Century Soviet Russia
The art of Soviet Russia may not strike the viewer as free or autonomous, but the artistic developments that flourished in this period influenced many important movements of 20th century art.
Art
Pulled into Robert Mapplethorpe's Vortex of Voyeurism
"What's S&M?" I overhear a woman asking her husband in the exhibition. "The artist says here that it stands for sex and magic, but this set up doesn't look very magical."
Art
Allen Ruppersberg, a Conceptual Artist in Love with the Physical World
Ruppersberg, who has lived between Los Angeles and New York since the 1960s, pushes the ordinary toward the extraordinary in wildly divergent works.
Art
An Exhibition Comparing Hockney and van Gogh Searches for Common Ground
A new exhibition at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum brings together depictions of the natural world by Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney.
Film
A New Documentary Creates a Deeply Confused Portrait of Steve Bannon
Alison Klayman's The Brink is stuck between the idea of Bannon as the Great Manipulator and Bannon as just another hateful fascist agitator.
Art
How Not to Decolonize Your Museum
The Asian Civilisations Museum's latest exhibition is a toothless interrogation of Sir Stamford Raffles, one of Southeast Asia's most notorious colonizers.
Books
Knausgaard Finds a Soulmate in Edvard Munch
Knausgaard's monomaniacal excavation of the self and soul probably finds its closest counterpart in the work of Munch, his countryman.
Books
A Novelist’s Beautiful, Unusual Tribute to Her Parents, Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman
Linn Ullmann shows that it is difficult but possible to carve out one’s own identity while honoring and loving one’s mother and father.
Books
A Graphic Novel Revives a Script by Salvador Dalí and the Marx Brothers
A new book shows it is time to realize a movie script conceived by Salvador Dalí and the Marx brothers in 1937.
Art
Sculptures Confront the Brutal History of Racialized Surveillance in the US
On view at MIT List Visual Arts Center, artist Kapwani Kiwanga's Safe Passage features powerful meditations on antebellum "lantern laws" and The Negro Motorist Green Book.
Art
When Vija Celmins Holds the Shifting World Still
Celmins's images of oceans and galaxies are powerfully personal and intimate, even if they are mysteriously deserted and distant.