Art
A Museum Where the Paintings Look Back
National Gallery, which premiered last month at the New York Film Festival, is the most recent of Frederick Wiseman’s 40-plus documentaries that feature single institutions.
Review
Art
The Sad Story of Jumbo the Elephant
MEDFORD, Mass. — Poor Jumbo. In P.T. Barnum’s hands he became the most famous African elephant in the world — lure to throngs of circus visitors and unknowing shill for countless products. His outsized fame, undimmed by his premature demise, has much to tell us about the rise of a celebrity-driven e
Art
Telling the History of the First "Illegals" in the United States
Chinese American consciously simulates the American immigrant’s journey: hope, dehumanization, mixed blessings; individual narratives that together paint the greater arc of America.
Performance
Child's Play: 600 Highwaymen Perform Employee of the Year
Perhaps there are a few whose steely hearts do not melt at the sight of a child in a tutu performing her first solo or, as the curtain rises, a lone grade-schooler pretending to be a tree. But 600 Highwaymen (writer/directors Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone) figures no one can resist five pre
Art
The Uses of Pleasure: Michelle Grabner at James Cohan
What most struck me about the now notorious Michelle Grabner review in the October 24th edition of The New York Times was that it was, unusually, surrounded by reviews of other painters.
Art
Painter, Interrupted: Losing Egon Schiele
Despite its inclusion of more than 130 works on paper and canvas, the ravishing retrospective Egon Schiele: Portraits, occupying the third floor of New York’s Neue Galerie, leaves you hungry. Not for more art, because there’s plenty of that, but for something else, something to make whole an ineffab
Books
Spotting Style in a More Bike-Friendly New York
When I became a bike rider back in the late 1970s, the very notion of New York Bike Style — now the title of a book by Sam Polcer (Prestel, 2014) — seemed like a contradiction in terms.
Art
Paul McCarthy's Raunchy Chocolate Fairytale
PARIS — I admit that I was nearly fed up with Paul McCarthy’s pretentious zombie provocation — and its sudden removal.
Art
The Politics of Prisons: Ai Weiwei at Alcatraz
SAN FRANCISCO — Stepping into a dingy and suffocatingly small cell, you're immersed in an intense soundscape of horns and the chanting of Tibetan monks. It’s overwhelming, and as the noise builds and bounces around the cold cement room, you wonder if this is akin to the feeling of being trapped insi
Art
Elementary and Simple: Christopher Williams at MoMA
"The art context is one of the few places where speculative thought and disinterested observation can still happen," the artist and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf professor Christopher Williams has said. This is a useful delusion.
Art
Beyond the Igloo: Mario Merz in London
LONDON — Among the few Italian contemporary art movements that made a mark on the international scene in 20th century, Arte Povera is probably the most interesting.
Art
Basquiat in the American South
NEW ORLEANS — To see Basquiat and the Bayou, the “exhibition within an exhibition” that by general consensus is the must-see component of the sprawling Prospect.3: Notes for Now biennial triennial that opened in New Orleans on October 25, you need to make your way to the top floor of the Ogden Museu