Art
After All These Years: Richard Van Buren’s Work of the ’70s
You never know when a work of art might become part of your DNA, the visceral memory of which you carry around with you, even if you seldom have occasion to think about it.
Review
Music
Yoko Ono’s New Music and New Writings: It’s Her Universe, and Welcome to It!
Today, Ono is no longer, as Lennon quipped in the late 1960s, “the world's most famous unknown artist”; at the time, he added: “everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”
Art
Self-Portraits in a Complex Mirror: The Photographs of Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier spent some forty years working as a nanny in Chicago. When she died in 2009 at the age of eighty-three, she left behind well over a hundred thousand photographic negatives, evidence of decades spent wandering the streets of her hometown, as well as others cities and locales around the w
Art
Paintings in the Interzone: More from the Corridors of MoMA
Last year I wrote an article called “What You Might Be Missing at MoMA,” which discussed the paintings exiled to the corridors of the Museum of Modern Art’s fourth and fifth floors.
Performance
The Unremarkable Death of Marina Abramović
Marina Abramović, as you may have heard, is dead. She has died at the age of 67 and is being celebrated at the Park Avenue Armory with a production by pioneering theater director Robert Wilson, called The Life and Death of Marina Abramović. She is also starring in the show, quite alive, alongside Wi
Art
Making Art in the Midwest
CHICAGO — The Midwest is no place for haters, slackers, and anyone who can't admit that they secretly love hot dogs and regularly daydream about living on a farm, or at least somewhere in the woods.
Art
A Look Inside Miami's New Art Museum
MIAMI — On opening night, I dutifully parked my car in the Omni parking lot as instructed and got inside the double-decker bus that would take me five or so blocks to the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). That ride on the top deck took nearly twenty minutes. We drove up the long driveway, past half-fin
Art
How an Ancient Egyptian Obelisk Ended Up in NYC
When Cleopatra's Needle was commissioned by Pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 BCE for the Heliopolis sun temple, the island that would be Manhattan was mostly woodlands.
Art
Seeing Calder Through His Shadows
When I was little I went to the Whitney Museum over and over to see “Cirque Calder,” Alexander Calder’s three-dimensional cartoon of performers preening, frozen in mise-en-scène. Walking into Calder Shadows, on view at Venus Over Manhattan, I felt the same childish camaraderie with the artist, only
Art
Duke Riley's Pigeon Army of Cuban Cigar Smugglers
The United States spends billions of dollars on a balloon surveillance system on the Florida Straits waters as part of its Trading with the Enemy Act against Cuba, the only country currently under the restriction. Yet as Brooklyn-based artist Duke Riley states in his video for a recent project: "As
Art
Photographer as Advocate: Lewis Hine's America
Odds are that when you close your eyes and imagine the huddled masses at Ellis Island, or brawny men at derricks hoisting iron bars to the top of the Empire State Building, you are seeing images that Lewis Hine introduced into the popular imagination.
Art
Blowing Smoke: Robert Wilson Agog Over Gaga in Louvre Show
PARIS — I was lucky enough, and I am old enough, to have been in the audience of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach in 1976 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and then again at The Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984.