Music
Bland in an Interesting Way
If the War on Drugs’s Lost in the Dream is a brilliant soft-pop masterpiece, a theory I am perfectly willing to entertain, it is brilliant in a way more suited to a platinum bestseller than to a critics’ record.
Review
Art
Rainy Day Woman: Jane Wilson Re-Visions Reality
Some sixty years ago, when she was a young artist involved in the downtown New York City scene, Jane Wilson stopped trying to be an Abstract Expressionist.
Art
Robert Gober’s Unanswered Questions
The sprawling, high-ceilinged contemporary art gallery on the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art might have been built for Richard Serra, but Robert Gober owns it.
Art
The Way the World Ends: Jude Tallichet’s U-Turn
It’s a full-size Hyundai Accent, circa 2000, collapsed in the middle of the gallery floor. Or rather, the shell of one, bone-white and cracked apart, like a melting iceberg or a flash-frozen relic from the next ice age.
Art
The Revolutionary Postcolonial Imagination of Surrealism
In 1945, Andre Breton traveled to the Haitian capital of Port au Prince to deliver a lecture on “Surrealism and Haiti."
Art
Photographs of Urgent Wilderness
Flush with riveting, enigmatic color and luxuriant depth of field, David Benjamin Sherry's monochrome photographs radiate beauty, urgency, and a certain humanness — as if their sublime scenes of mountains, forests, and rock formations had been blasted and dyed by a human detonation.
Art
Drawing the Face of the War Machine
The Drawing Center has mounted a strange and surreal show of drawings by Xanti Schawinsky, an underrated artist whose 50-plus-year career spanned the 1920s to the late ’70s.
Books
Cats, Cans, and More Curiosities from Toy Camera History
The colorful history of toy cameras, those affordable film cameras in plastic boxes, is being celebrated in a new book.
Performance
Performing the Rituals of Rebellion
In our increasingly digital world, live performance still manages to bring us together, away from the keyboard, for a period of time, however brief. Attending a performance is a kind of ritualistic act, which I have been thinking about since witnessing DEBUT, a new performance work by choreographer
Art
An Exhibition to Put on (and Inside) Your Head
PARIS — Located in La Chaux-de-Fonds near Neuchâtel in the Swiss Jura Mountains, watchmakers Greubel Forsey are celebrating their tenth anniversary by honoring the gadfly artist Robert Filliou (1926–1987) in Paris with a rather curious show called Chapeaux! Hommage à Robert Filliou — and with a nonf
Art
Martha Rosler Tackles the Problem of Representation
LONDON — In the ’70s, photographer (and videographer, and rigorous cultural critic, and possible genius) Martha Rosler brought a critical eye, politically and philosophically, to the medium’s seductive pretenses of objectivity.
Art
In a Booth at Frieze London, Everything's Home but Nobody's There
LONDON — While one Helly Nahmad sits in a bare concrete prison cell in upstate New York, another Helly Nahmad strides around his lavish Frieze Masters booth in London’s chi-chi Regent’s Park. I don’t know how captivity is suiting the former, but freedom isn’t doing that much for the latter.