Books
What Is an Artist Book, Really?
Artists’ Book Not Artists’ Book, as the title suggests, is to explore the fine line between whether a book is an artists’ book or not. It all is more playful than that may sound.
Review
Art
The Struggle for Coherence
The other day, at a small cocktail party, a literary agent told me that he liked writers who knew and wrote for their audience. Our conversation soon sputtered out because I didn’t see any value in disagreeing with him. A few minutes later, a writer confided that he would keep working on a manuscrip
Books
Some Sentences to Relax With
As I sometimes — or quite a lot of the time — find myself disposed to avoid the demands of work and household, my favorite dodge is perusing much read books for those “juicy” parts that I’ve doted over for years. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy is just the right book for this kind of time wasting: It’s a no
Art
Sassily Serious and Seriously Sassy
I set out with the intention of seeing these shows, so I wouldn’t call it synchronicity, but the simultaneous exhibitions of David Goerk and Martha Clippinger in the same building, just one floor apart, did get me thinking about art making that is concerned with the realm between painting and sculpt
Art
Smells Like Art
Christophe Laudamiel is not a purist. “I love fabric softener,” asserts the world-renowned perfumer turned high art dissident. While he’s no snob about lowbrow smells, his exhibition Phantosmia - All But the Smell, which opened on Wednesday at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea, is an olfactory treat. Ph
Art
A Tinkerer of the Highest Order
Before I talk about her exhibition, I want to share an anecdote about the artist. In 1997, June Leaf breezed into my studio at the Vermont Studio Center with a disarming smile from ear to ear. (It was the first time we met.) As she looked over my work, chatting and laughing, she spotted my skateboar
Books
Three Different Styles of the Artist Monograph
Sometimes a gallery’s books are more interesting than the artwork they regularly exhibit, and you can peruse their best artists and exhibitions from the confines of a well-constructed catalogue.
Art
New App Puts SLR Features Into Your iPhone
How do you make your iPhone act more like your SLR? Well, Chicago-based Ben Syverson has an app for that.
Art
Murder Is Weegee's Business
"Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this," Joseph Cotten's character Holly Martins is warned in The Third Man, the classic 1949 film noir that takes place in a war fractured Vienna. The line came into my head while viewing the photographs in Weegee: Murder is My Business at the Internation
Art
What Is Chicago Style?
CHICAGO — Is Chicago an artistic center on the same level as New York, London or LA? Is there an identifiable “Chicago school," in the same way as the school of Paris or the post-war art movements in Manhattan? Does Chicago produce “famous” artists and artists worthy of greater fame?
Books
John Ashbery's Arthur Rimbaud
It’s to be expected that when America’s greatest living poet publishes a translation of one of the greatest and — to borrow a phrase from the titles of old forgotten anthologies — best-loved poets of world modernity, readers would take notice. And they have, so maybe I should think twice before addi
Art
The Immaculate Conception of Damien Hirst
“You do know, don’t you, that even well-meaning people are pawns for the powerful, and when it comes right down to it, humans are best thought of as oversized prawns waiting to be plucked from their beds of ice? Personally, I like to methodically squeeze the plumpest and pinkest ones between my thum