Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (July 2013, Part 2)
It's Alternarock Week at Critical Catalogue Headquarters with reviews of the Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, Adult, and Laura Marling.
Review
Art
Great Outdoors: The Biennial of the Americas in Denver
In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard envisions the house as a "vertical being," with two symbolic poles: the irrationality of the cellar and the rational consciousness of the roof. “Up near the roof, all our thoughts are clear … Here we participate in the carpenter’s solid geometry.” The same can b
Art
A Midsummer Group Show Dream
CHICAGO — As we settle into midway-through-summer mode here in the city that does sleep sometimes, we spend more time hanging at the beach, BBQing with friends and generally chillaxing. With this slowing down of general movement comes the proliferation of — wait for it! — the summer group show.
Art
Sculpture that Just Wants to Play
Some curious creatures have arrived in City Hall Park, although they look pretty miserable about it. Olaf Breuning's "The Humans," with its loop of anthropomorphic figures showing a story of humans evolving from fish to fisher king, has each whimsical figure sporting a deep frown upon their marble f
Art
The Inner Life of a Museum
Jem Cohen’s new feature film, Museum Hours, unfolds like a series of postcards from a lonely traveler, fresh with the pressure of on-site writing while calculating that the memory will be received miles and days away. Shooting primarily in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cohen’s foreign camera se
Art
Two British Painters Use Style as Substance
Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) and Gary Hume (born 1962) have 34 years between them, and yet their work is similar and compelling enough to warrant a twin retrospective at Tate Britain. Because the Tate has prudently divided the artists — “offering visitors the chance to see the work of two complemen
Art
The Slippery Slope of Perspective
CHICAGO — Are you a viewer, voyeur, or just a wallflower? These interchangeable labels provide a curious starting point for ways to think about the relationship between the subject and the (art) object in Slippery Slope, a group exhibition at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago.
Art
Trying to Make Galleries Relevant, One JPEG at a Time
Send Me the JPEG at Winkleman Gallery is not a show about art, but about the art world. Its title derives from a new phenomenon wherein collectors forgo viewing art firsthand and instead buy works based on digital photographs alone. Those who still love encountering new art in person worry to what e
Film
Ghost in the (Chess) Machine
Set sometime in the ’80s, mumblecore maven Andrew Bujalski’s fourth feature, Computer Chess, is an adventurous and peculiar period piece. Chronicling a tournament of computers competing in chess and the programmers who code them, the film endearingly evokes the nascent and heady era before smart pho
Art
Whatever Happened to the Met's Jade Room?
The jade collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was once showcased in an opulent room in the style of Louis XV, with fifteen delicate glass cases presided over by a chandelier. But it's vanished as if it were never there.
Art
Antiquities and Idiosyncrasies in 18th-Century Britain
The stately facade of Sir John Soane’s Museum sits on the northwest side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a square, grassy park filled with young Londoners throwing frisbees, drinking beer, and flirting. The interior of the museum, at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, is a strikingly different environment, a purpose
Art
Bodies Left Behind
CHICAGO — There’s always some sort of surprise awaiting you in the basement. Consent is not necessary here; you are allowed to freely descend the stairs of Woman Made Gallery, where two solo exhibitions by Brenna Conley-Fonda and Robin Hustle await. Both of these artists implicate their bodies and b