Art
What a Teenager's Backpack Tells Us About Art
CHICAGO — Amanda Ross-Ho recreated a soft-sculpture replica of an anonymous teen-girl's backpack, blowing it up to 400% of its original size.
Review
Art
Score! A Game of Hollow Victory Feeds Our Need for Reward
As an art game playing off our constant need for reward, Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise propels you into surreal scenarios of strutting through a landscape of explosions unharmed, collecting endless coins, and jumping inhumanly high into a digital infinity.
Art
Contemporary Art's Unease with Faith
MILTON KEYNES, UK — Art, which has been called a religion, has a serious problem with faith. Genocides may come and go leaving the beliefs of many intact, but contemporary art is a sensitive flower — in many ways it is still getting over World War One.
Art
From Ruin to Re-creation: Theaster Gates Returns to Chicago
CHICAGO — Theaster Gates’s installation 13th Ballad at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) continues his investigation of art objects and social activism, which started in 2009 with the redevelopment of derelict houses in a South Chicago neighborhood, and which he took to a national stage a
Art
A Parisian Retrospective on Marcel Breuer's Manhattan Vision
PARIS — "What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?" architect Marcel Breuer asked in explaining his design for the Whitney Museum of American Art. "Surely it should work, it should fulfill its requirements, but what is its relationship to the New York landscape? What does it express, wh
Art
A Space Where Identity Politics Give Way to Queer Minimalism
What happened to the glitter, the queer ideals, the mirror that looks back at the viewer? In Aay Preston-Myint’s artwork, politically charged objects are emptied of their significance. In his solo exhibition (At Night, I Think of You), now on view at Threewalls gallery, sculpture, sound and photogra
Art
Making a Heaven in Hell: The Angel of the Odd's Dark Romanticism
PARIS — With the bloody revolutions of the late 1700s, the mood in Europe was apprehensive and brooding about the future. Perhaps then it's no surprise that the art from that time has a certain gloominess to it as well. Yet what is unexpected is the strange beauty certain artists began to give their
Art
Modernism’s Beginning and Its End
LOS ANGELES — Modernism may be dead, yet we spend an awful lot of time in its clutches: talking about it, building it, watching it, exhibiting it, and acquiring its graceful artifacts for our homes. Our culture is in such a thrall to some of the movement’s architectural and artistic manifestations —
Books
In Faygo Veritas: Shooting the Juggalos
Scorn for redneck culture — often dressed up as ironic appreciation — has long been a standby of American humor, a mechanism by which socioeconomic tension is reduced to a soothing cascade of condescension. It's a classic indulgence of middle class banality, kind of like a mall fountain, but more cr
Performance
Can Theatre Help Us to Better Understand the Elderly?
Despite the regular way it ticks by, time doesn't always seem to move at a logical pace. Days blur gradually from one to the next, yet it can also feel like years have escaped in a sudden flash. This paradox of time is central to Sprat Theatre Company's One Day in the Life of Henri Shnuffle, which i
Books
Thrivers in the Muck: Matias Viegener (Part One)
Sometimes, it is hard to remember that Social Media came along years after the rise of the personal computer and the Internet, which Al Gore called the “Information Superhighway.” But like the highway in Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic comedy, Weekend (1967), the Internet is littered with refuse and u
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (May 2013, Part 2)
In part 2 of this month, reviews of Draft Punk, the Knife, Matuto, and Paramore.