Art
After the Oil's Gone: Turning a Boomtown's Forgotten Downtown into an Arts Center
The new downtown satellite of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa is part of a reinvigorating of the Oklahoma city's downtown.
Review
Art
Pyschedelic Plans for a Post-Apocalyptic Paris
Out of apocalyptic ruin, a Parisian street-sweeper imagined his city rising again with staggering spires grasping up to the skies. These artistic "blueprints" by Marcel Storr were long secreted away, but recent exhibitions have brought this restless new world into the public eye.
Art
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things
BRIGHTON, U.K. — It was 1624 when the poet John Donne wrote: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Nearly 400 years later he would have blown a gasket to see the way we use mobile phones and social networks. And were he to have seen a new show at Nottingham Contemporary, he might have been moved
Art
How Does One Make an Image of Revolution?
LOS ANGELES — What does it mean to be a revolutionary? How does one make an image of revolution? What are the parallels between religion and revolution? And does religion have a place in our current world?
Art
A Miniature Kingdom of Infinite Space
In art, control is an elemental if underappreciated principle. At a basic level, art entails control; control over material, control over process, a lack of control over chance. Amid the chaos of life, what do you seek to selectively remove and stage? Richard Avedon viewed it as art’s defining eleme
Art
In Chicago, an Art Crawl on Steroids
CHICAGO — There was an art walk last Thursday evening in the River North district, an area with many upscale, decades-old galleries that some may consider conservative. Paintings and sculptures with big price tags on them shared the space with musicians, visiting speakers, and a musico-theatrical pe
Art
Strangers in the Night: Laurel Nakadate Meets Her Relatives
As the child of an interracial marriage (I got to meet my blue-eyed, English grandmother when I was seven, later discovering that she bore an uncanny resemblance to Virginia Woolf), I have to admit to having more than a passing interest in Laurel Nakadate’s most recent, ongoing photo project, Relati
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (June 2013, Part 1)
In part 1 of this month, Chelsea Light Moving, Balquees, Brad Paisley, and Tyler the Creator.
Art
Crackup: Llyn Foulkes Gives Us the Art We Deserve
With its superb retrospective of the art of Llyn Foulkes, the New Museum pulls off the almost impossible trick of elucidating the work of a long-neglected, unclassifiable and thoroughly recalcitrant figure without sacrificing its mysteries or thorniness.
Art
The Cubist Cowboy Rodeo
OKLAHOMA CITY — Both Cubism and the cowboy rodeo rose to prominence in the early 20th century, and their wrangling of energy into one clashing place is a shared kinetic spirit. Yet Wayne White's massive mechanical puppets may be the first art to really embrace their kindred energy.
Art
The Gentle Tension of Abstraction
LOS ANGELES — Time slows within the work of Spanish painter Juan Usle. Though he fits stylistically within the realm of Abstract Expressionism, he shows us again that not all brush strokes need to jump off the canvas, as if caught in a nervous seizure, that there is something to be said for pace, ti
Art
Visions of Light at the Guggenheim
Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York is one of the most famous contemporary art institutions in the world, and yet part of that fame, lending the place a kind of quasi-notoriety, is the idea that the building itself isn't actually a great venue for showing art. Or as architecture Paul