Film
Invisible Cities: Matthew Barney's Blindspot
Let’s look past the globules, barnacles, and goo. At its heart, Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament is a film about white, male America’s failure to comprehend urbanism.
Review
Art
The Possibilities of Paper: Czech Pop-Up Book Art
The innovative paper engineering of an overlooked Czech artist is currently filling the second floor gallery of the Grolier Club. The Upper East Side bibliophilic society opened an exhibition of pop-up books and other paper art by Vojtěch Kubašta last month, but for a long time the artist's work cou
Art
Art and Liquor in Greenpoint
Chelsea openings, for the most part, are what they are: slightly glamorous events drawing fashionable crowds that are held in lovely, spacious galleries that tend to show predictable, big-name artists.
Art
A Gallery Night for People Who Hate Openings
For those of us who want to connect with an artistic community but resist openings with curmudgeonly fervor, there is hope: Greenpoint Gallery Night.
Books
Two Illustrators Tackle the Stories of New York City and San Francisco
Hello, New York: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Five Boroughs and Meanwhile in San Francisco: A City in its Own Words — each being published in March by Chronicle Books — are like compilations of memory from living in a city.
Books
Art's Post-Media Malaise
PARIS — The post-media suggestion itself has been the subject of deliberation for around two decades now. This audacious anthology cleverly brings some of these historical texts together, along with newly commissioned ones, to explore the shifting ideas and speculative practices associated with the
Art
Models of Frank Lloyd Wright's Utopia Show the Architect as City Planner
Frank Lloyd Wright believed dense urban cities would never make it into the next century. He wrote that "the citizen of the near future preferring horizontality — the gift of his motorcar, and telephonic or telegraphic inventions — will turn and reject verticality as the body of any American city."
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (February 2014, Part 1)
In part 1 of this month, reviews of 2 Chainz, Panic! at the Disco, Jason Isbell, David Bowie, and El-P & Killer Mike.
Art
Forensic Observer: The Recent Paintings of Josephine Halvorson
Josephine Halvorson transcribes the anonymous, weather-beaten traces left by those who might otherwise have left no other mark of their existence behind.
Art
A Tale of Two Cities: Charles Marville's Photographs of Paris before Haussmann
The life of French photographer Charles Marville, the subject of a retrospective currently at the Metropolitan Museum, comes down to us hazy in its contours. Born Charles-François Bossu in 1813 to a family of artisans and tradesmen, Marville rid himself of “Bossu” (hunchback) after being teased abou
Art
It’s a Man’s World: Inside a Postwar Art Time Capsule
There may be some great-looking specimens of postwar art in Re-View: Onnasch Collection — an exhibition that turns Hauser & Wirth’s cavernous Chelsea outpost into a mini-museum offering the kind of intimate experiences that have been all but lost in New York’s uptown behemoths — but the show also ar
Film
Capturing Slow Portraits of People and Landscapes
Koyanisqaatsi, a debut collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass, broke ground in so many ways in the 1980's for exploring film as a poetic, rather than narrative or theatrical expression. Over ten years later, Reggio and Glass have come together to produce Visitors, a