Art
Sarah Cain’s Girl Power Paintings
Walking into Sarah Cain’s current show, Burning Bush, at Gallerie Lelong is to be restored.
Review
Books
New York Noir: Capturing the City's Grit and Grime
Photographer Michael Ernest Sweet scavenges the constant contrasts of people in New York City for shots that show the grittiness and grime of its collective persona. Some of these photographs have been collected into a noir narrative called The Human Fragment, a monograph released in December by ind
Art
LA Noise, Loud and Clear
LOS ANGELES — Long after local businesses have closed shop for the day, things become very loud at 3709 W. Pico Blvd. It is the kind of noise that can be mistaken for a technical malfunction, like white noise amplified by a faulty monitor, but at Mata Noise, everything that is harsh, non-musical, an
Art
Museum Arcade: Indie Games Edition
From controlling a flower petal on the wind to experiencing a five minute memento mori in pixels, Indie Essentials: 25 Must-Play Video Games at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria brings together some recent touchstones of independent game design in a playable setting.
Art
Mean Green Performance Machine
NOTTINGHAM, U.K. — Seeing both notebook and pen, a fellow spectator says with some disbelief: “Are you reviewing this? Well, good luck!” My challenges are well apparent, thanks to the inexplicable outbreaks of dance, song and puppetry.
Art
Meditations in Longing
LOS ANGELES — The writer Rebecca Solnit once wrote, “Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist.” For artists Golnar Adili and Samira Yamin, the process of remembering is
Art
Carrie Mae Weems Brings Change to the Guggenheim
This year, Carrie Mae Weems gets the distinctive honor of becoming the first African-American woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim — her first major exhibition at any New York museum, ever. It’s one of those honors that sits at an awkward intersection, both disappointing and profound.
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (February 2014, Part 2)
In part 2 of this month, reviews of Fall Out Boy, Luke Bryan, R.Kelly, Sky Ferreira, and Speedy Ortiz.
Art
Deborah Grant’s Archive of Real and Imagined Encounters
There is a lot to say about Deborah Grant’s installation at the Drawing Center, Christ You Know it Ain't Easy!!, which was curated by Claire Gilman. What is so delicious about it is that at some point you will not be sure whether any of narratives you’ve applied to the work makes sense.
Books
Laird Barron, 'The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All'
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (Nightshade Books, 2013) is Laird Barron’s fifth book and his third collection of short stories. Barron’s fiction is Horror with a capital H. He has a Weird Lovecraftian streak, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
Books
War Elephants and Pious Cats: Basil Bunting's Persian Poems
The recent death of William Weaver, the acclaimed translator of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Primo Levi and other modern Italian authors, spurred memories of the translation class he taught at Columbia University back in the late 1970s. A small group of students listened attentively to his thoughts a
Art
Communal Spirits: Artists, Advocates and Unlocked Rooms
Stacked against the market-driven myth of the solitary genius, the role of community in fostering creative ferment is generally given short shrift. The neatly coordinated categories we encounter in museums, arranged by time period, style or place of origin, barely touch on the diverse constituencies