Art Review
Fifteen Shows in One at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies
This beast of an exhibition includes kinky live performances, site-specific installations, and a prevailing feeling of joyousness.
Review
Book Review
Unraveling the Imperial Impulses of Chinese Textiles
Like an art history detective, Mei Mei Rado mines textiles and techniques to reveal cross-cultural Chinese-European liaisons driven by nationalism and a keen interest in design.
Art Review
One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Art
An exhibition argues that human production — its surplus and waste — is a rising influential force in contemporary art.
Art Review
Global Tourism Was Built on Headless Blemmyes
The Book of Marvels is the kind of show that’s hard to avoid at archival art institutions, wherein problematic historical content, aesthetic appeal, and fantasy all intersect.
Art Review
An Exhibition That Looks to the Bronx for Inspiration
“Working Knowledge” is deeply attuned to the Bronx community it emerges from — an attentiveness that greatly enhances its significance.
Book Review
A Mystical, Obsessive Encounter With the Ginseng Root
Craig Thompson’s rhizomatic new graphic novel about the root’s farming industry exposes the paradoxes of Trump’s America.
Art Review
Will the Real Cimabue Please Stand Up?
The Louvre’s conservation of two Cimabue paintings led its curators to reassess the artist not as a predecessor to the Renaissance masters but on his own merits.
Book Review
Internet Misinformation Is the New Medieval Magical Thinking
Readers might enjoy the gross and gory fairy-tale quality of this new book — or its parallels to the Trumpian internet.
Art Review
The UCLA MFA Show Proves We’ve Got to Learn From Students
Far from perfect, their work illustrates the kind of mess, ambition, and attention that many artists would be lucky to have.
Film Review
An Artist Who Transgressed the Boundaries of the Body
“A Body to Live In” takes a multilayered perspective on artist Fakir Musafar’s life to creatively excavate his role as a pioneer of extreme body modification.
Art Review
When Modernity Grabbed Poetry By Its Heels
Feeling, intuiting the swing, sway, and pressures of life, with all its tumult, its blare, its bounce, and its heave, were what really counted in modern poetry.
Art Review
The Courtauld’s Impressionism Show Is a Victim of Corporate Curating
It seems that the philanthropic funds that enable shows like this are at the expense of art historical depth and integrity, perhaps even curators’ jobs.