Art
When BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in April 2010, an estimated 172 million gallons of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the worst petroleum-industry spill in U.S. history. The stories and images of crude oil reaching the coastlines of the Gulf States were appalling — pelica
Art
While at The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, one question kept popping up in my mind: What is with this obsessive nostalgia for the decaying, destroyed and often depressing New York of the past, particularly as connected to the eme
Art
On my last trip to Chelsea, hoping to find something unusual, I was largely disappointed. Making my way through the crowded beehive gallery building at 526 West 26th Street, I felt doom encroach upon my heart, as each show struck at me with numbing sameness. Then, I suddenly and happily stumbled upo
Art
Alison Klayman’s 90-minute film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry set out to be a portrait of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and along the way morphed into a highbrow, jaw-dropping reality show about fumbling, corrupt governments (China), social media (Twitter), democracy and art (Weiwei) and the power of the st
Art
I live in Bushwick. I don’t have a hip loft and there are no artisan flea markets, coffee shops or health food stores. Out by the cemetery, in what is technically Bushwick, but is a stone’s throw from Bed-Stuy and East New York, I naively assumed I was a lone outpost of the art world. I couldn’t hav
Art
Despite Bushwick Basel’s tongue-in-cheek name, the title suits this new art fair, as it is an art fair, albeit a very, very small one. Bushwick Basel, which consisted this year of 11 local galleries, is the kind of fair you could imagine Nada or Pulse being like when they first began — a fair that f
Art
The impetus for the Bushwick Open Studios weekend is the concept of the “open studio.” It’s an opportunity for artists, curators and dealers to visit and talk to artists about their work in their spaces. But this past weekend, 56 Bogart Street served as a microcosm of the new Bushwick, where dealers
Art
Despite its name, the sprawling weekend (June 1–3) of Bushwick Open Studios actually overtakes the bounds of one neighborhood into the greater North Brooklyn art scene, including some spaces in another borough entirely.
Books
“A literary event!” — every middlebrow doorstop of a novel gets saddled with that cliché. You’d think aesthetic significance could be determined by weight. Or that literature had no other time frame than that of the publishers’ seasonal catalogue, destined to wait a bit longer to be trashed than the
Art
This is what a small group of people — most of them artists living in and around New York — know. Xylor Jane is a singular figure, and her widely spaced exhibitions are regarded as events.
Books
Brian Evenson’s writing might well be, in the words of a character from his new story collection Windeye, published by the venerable Coffee House Press, a means of “capturing on paper and holding steady and immobile the various motions and bodies that constitute an event.” The twenty-five new storie
Art
I recall the 1993-1994 Lucian Freud retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as possibly the dreariest exhibition I’d ever seen there.