Art
The New Whitney Museum, a Machine for Looking at Art — and Being Seen Looking at Art
In 1977, Jean Baudrillard published his take on a shiny new art museum that had just opened in Paris.
Review
Art
The Surprisingly Improvisational Sounds of Automatic Music
HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — Musicians throughout the ages have wrestled with the question of creative control, and in our modern age, some have found an answer in technology.
Books
Portraits of Afghani Women Imprisoned for "Moral" Crimes
"The female prison population in Afghanistan overwhelmingly consists of individuals who are serving 5-to-15-year sentences for moral crimes," Gabriela Maj writes in Almond Garden: Portraits from the Women's Prisons in Afghanistan, out next month from Daylight Books.
Performance
Turning a Classic Soviet Sci-Fi Flick into a Live Performance
Layered with live performances, multimedia feeds, and casts in which everyone is an actor (including the cameramen and musicians), Doris Mirescu's plays channel the model of the fun house.
Art
The Strange Union of Contemporary Art and the Hudson River School
HUDSON, NY — River Crossings, the recently opened show up at the historic Thomas Cole House and Olana, Frederic Edwin Church's architectural ode to Orientalism, over-promises and under-delivers.
Books
The Nomadic Libraries Bringing Books to the Four Corners of the Globe
Arriving by camel in remote areas of Mongolia or on boat along the coast of Norway, contemporary libraries are often mobile, creative, and community-driven, and are adapting rather than fading with the rise of electronic books and decrease in budgets.
Art
Voodoo, Abstraction, and a Haitian Artist in Paris
PARIS — The art in Hervé Télémaque’s Centre Pompidou retrospective floats between Port-au-Prince, New York, and Paris.
Art
What Was Art of the 1990s All About?
MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY — To devote a show to an era is to delimit the era in question, carving it off from surrounding epochs and ascribing some measure of thematic or aesthetic continuity to it.
Performance
A Tale of Revenge that Runs from Ancient Greece to ISIS
Playwright Charles Mee is a master at mining ancient myths for the truths that transcend memory-torturing details and reimagining those truths for contemporary theatergoers.
Art
When Found Photographs Tell New Stories
SAN FRANCISCO — Situated directly under the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, Pier 24 Photography occupies a 28,000 square foot warehouse originally built in 1935.
Art
Paintings That Blur Pixel and Pigment
The title of the current group show at The Hole gallery, Post-Analog Painting, sounds like a term invented by art historians.
Art
Robert Grosvenor and the Anonymous Laborer
I don’t know Robert Grosvenor, and I have never heard him give a talk, but years ago he made a huge impression on me.