Art
"You're all too young and too clean-cut to remember, but I was a star in the golden age of Times Square sleaze," snears burlesque superstar Tigger-James Ferguson, playing a washed-up Times Square prostitute in my favorite of his performances. That piece kept popping up in my mind while visiting Scot
Art
Why is the right to buy a gun so profound? Maybe because it's really about the right to be a badass. Black Power, a provocative show up for just six days at the Superchief Gallery at Culturefix, probes the connections between guns, badass characters, and race. With the gun-control conversation ragin
Art
Distilling violence into art is a tricky alchemy. Even when done carefully, it can result in a strange brew, leaving some intoxicated and moved by its heady ascetics, others feeling sick and hung-up on its inherent horror, sadness, and trauma. In On Photography, Susan Sontag famously enunciated that
Art
Jan Fabre's current exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris features an open coffin and insects crawling all over human brains, yet it's one of the least startling things the high profile Belgian artist has done.
Art
LOS ANGELES — Often, I find museum exhibitions that have to do with celebrity or Hollywood culture to be a shameless attempt to generate a blockbuster-sized crowd who, flocking to the museum in droves, boost attendance numbers for the year. That being said, the massive installation Stanley Kubrick a
Art
Do you know Adonis? He's not like those other male nudes that only exist to flaunt their bodies. Adonis has a touch of the ethereal. Delicate, almost elvish, features lend a gentleness to his face. He's taut but not Herculean. He is mature but retains the slim, willowy frame of youth. This special k
Art
PARIS — When I stepped into the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, I knew I would be seeing a lot of taxidermy trophies and guns in this museum of the hunt and nature, but I wasn't expecting contemporary art. However, since its renovation in 2007, the museum in Paris' Marais neighborhood has embedd
Art
CHICAGO — In the GIF world of twohundredfiftysixcolors, there is no time to process visual imagery; viewers are left with reaction options to each short GIF much like those found on a Buzzfeed post. It’s all <3, LOL, WIN, OMG, CUTE, WTF, UNBELIEVABLE, SCARY, FAIL TRASHY, OLD, EW, <heart break! or wh
Books
The diversity of sex and gender in the animal kingdom is totally overlooked when people use the argument "it's not natural" to say that someone's lifestyle goes against their personal moral constructs. What's "natural" is actually incredibly complex, considering we have hermaphrodite leopard slugs,
Art
CHICAGO — Typical American movie moments of heightened tension use signal sounds in tandem with the emotions portrayed by the actors on screen. The family dog knocks over a precious antique plate, and an ominous tune rolls in to signify that the pup is about to get in trouble. Dad arrives home only
Art
Two billion cells make up the skin encasing our bodies, and 300 million of them are replaced every day. We need a sense of bodily integrity so much that if we lose a limb, we imagine it's still there, itching and aching, and yet our skin, that exterior layer actually holding us together, is constant
Art
PARIS — Eileen Gray designed furniture that didn't so much inhabit as space as touch lightly on it. With discreet forms and minimalist waves that contrasted their industrial materials to the waning of Art Nouveau, the Irish designer quietly influenced the modernism that would guide architecture and