Art
More than Meets the Eye
If you see lots of work by different artists, you are going to make your own connections.
Review
Books
Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker Tell the Real Life Stories of Fabulous Females
In the tradition of Lives of the Saints and, even more pointedly, Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Lives of Wives, visual artist Susan Bee and book artist Johanna Drucker have created a wonderful new “picture” book, Fabulas Feminae or fables of women.
Music
Justin Bieber, Sex Panther
The consensus was that this former child star’s career was over; no longer in his target demographic’s age range, he found himself unable to push the same buttons as before, and was prepared to fade, slowly but honorably, from the public spotlight.
Art
Firestarter: Otto Piene’s Elemental Art
The victors and the vanquished approached the development of avant-garde art in the aftermath of World War II in markedly different ways.
Books
The Origins of Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in a One-Legged Chair
When the TWA Flight Center opened in 1962 at New York's JFK Airport, its swooping form seemed to embody flight itself, with its two white wings rising from the tarmac.
Art
A Soviet Monument’s Enduring Power Over Russian Artists
MOSCOW — The kinds of memories that our museums and monuments trigger are never about remembering the past as much as they are about imagining the future.
Film
A Filmmaker Probes the Magic and Madness of Female Adolescence
LOS ANGELES — As a woman who was once a teenage girl, I have a certain fondness for any filmic or visual art that harkens back to that time of intense, unbridled feelings, awkward physical changes, and sexual desires running wild ’n free.
Art
The Vibrant Art that Emerged from Socialist Yugoslavia
NOTTINGHAM, UK — Between the early 1960s and mid-1980s, the country once known as Yugoslavia was an anomaly: a socialist state which allowed free travel to the West and promoted “self-management” rather than bureaucratic repression; a dictatorship which promoted decentralization and free expression.
Art
Six Decades of Betye Saar’s Personal, Political, and Mystical Art
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — There are few artists who have been able to become a household name in the art world and still maintain a modesty to their person and in their work.
Art
In Paris, a Museum of African Art Brings Out Its Jewels
PARIS — In his prescient book Black Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein describes certain transcendent examples of African sculpture as a form of “fixed ecstasy.”
Art
Garments from the Graves of Late Antiquity
Over 50 examples of textile garments and furnishings are on view in Designing Identity: The Power of Textiles in Late Antiquity at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
Art
Yo, Make Deborah Kass's Public Sculpture in Brooklyn Permanent!
When I first saw it in November I was immediately inclined to bemoan the fact that Deborah Kass's canary yellow public sculpture "OY/YO," installed on the Brooklyn waterfront in Dumbo, will not be there permanently.