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.
Review
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.
Art
A New Swiss Museum Shows Women’s Art Through a Multivalent Lens
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women at the Museum Susch suggests that letting women be multivalent is a critical piece of letting women be seen.
Music
James Blake Grows Up
Assume Form is Blake’s first album to acknowledge his status as a pop presence, but it also feels like an attempt to broaden his range, to correct the way he became associated with generic melancholy.
Art
Color Is the Carrier of Emotion
Although it is very early in Jule Korneffel’s career, she has moved into a territory where color and materiality outweigh discursive content.
Art
Reconsidering Saul Steinberg
In an art world that celebrates the work of Raymond Pettibon, it seems to me that Steinberg deserves another look.
Art
Reviving a Forgotten Artist of the Occult
Today, more than 100 million copies of Pamela Colman Smith’s Tarot card designs, the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck, are in circulation in over 20 countries, making it the most popular set ever made.