Performance
From Slut Shaming to Systemic Racism, Indie Opera Tackles Timely Issues
These operas are not the types of performances seen at traditional opera venues with their generous budgets, megastars, and perfect-pitch performances.
Review
Books
Bursts of Humor and Intricate Visuals in a Collection of Alan Moore's Lesser-Known Comics
Though "Brighter Than You Think" is of limited use as a critical text, it’s tough to beat as a straight-up collection.
Art
An Artist Invites Viewers to Become Like the Animals to Understand the Animals
"The Unreliable Bestiary" evolved around interwoven stories, illustrated with beautiful videos of animals and habitats, maps, researched data, and costumed dancers in barn-like interior spaces and out “in the wild.”
Art
A Timely but Limited Look at Feminist Art from the 1970s
Far from perfect, this exhibition marks a step toward empowering voices that could do much to liberate our own identity from the cultural codes by which it continues to be confined.
Books
Reader’s Diary: David Graeber’s 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years'
It's no wonder that few things inspire as much persistent paranoia as banking. But a little paranoia might not be such a bad thing.
Art
The Difficulty of Getting the News: Lois Dodd, Sally Hazelet Drummond, and the Narrative of Exclusion
What the exhibition of Drummond and Dodd proves is that the art world was more diverse in the 1960s than has been told.
Art
No Point of View Is the Best View of All: Artists Working Between 1952–65, Many of Whom Are Forgotten
If 1962 is the dividing line between one art world and what we seem to have inherited, Inventing Downtown will bring you back to the period before the “art Establishment crossed the street.”
Art
What Lies Beneath: Carl D'Alvia's Buried Meanings
Though he wears his scholarship lightly, Carl D'Alvia is adept at the semaphores of 20th-century sculpture.
Art
Elizabeth Murray, Force of Nature
Elizabeth Murray's work on paper is utterly free-form, a launchpad for a gamut of choices that rush from points A to Z with head-snapping speed.
Art
Andy Warhol's Self-Conscious and Perfect Bodies
My Perfect Body makes plain Warhol's self-conscious relationship to his own body and fascination with others.
Art
The Making of Antoine Bourdelle's Early Modern War Monument
An exhibition at the Musée Bourdelle reveals the process behind its namesake's beguiling monument to veterans of the Franco-Prussian War.
Art
Francis Picabia’s Prescient, Painterly Promiscuousness
Thirty years ago, viewers may have found the dramatic shifts in his work bewildering; today it’s obvious that he was an artistic driving force of the 20th century.