Art
Tate's Survey of Caribbean-British Art Centers Britain
By the end of Life Between Islands, the island that is centered in this exhibition is Britain, and “the Caribbean” remains a loose, ill-defined, hazy backdrop
Reviews
Books
Can Poetry Make a Difference?
Contemporary politically committed poets have made a cottage industry of agonizing over the question of whether their Leftist bona fides actually make any difference.
Art
Why Is a Virtual Veronese Artwork at a Physical Museum?
To play devil’s advocate, you could argue that eventually technology will be so good that everyone will have VR, and there is no need to travel to the National Gallery at all to see art.
Art
Brad Kahlhamer and the Amalgamations of Existence
Relationships, not isolation, inform Kahlhamer’s ideas of identity
Film
Letting a Dairy Cow’s Life Speak for Itself
In her documentary Cow, Andrea Arnold avoids anthropomorphism, instead trying to present the world as her main character sees it.
Art
At the Baltimore Museum of Art, Joy That Is a Little Askew
Richard Yarde’s watercolors make a historical document into something personal, wistful, more a vision than a visual fact.
Art
In Puerto Rico, Artists Transform Loss Into Creation
Rather than centering on death, Novenario broadens the meaning of mourning as it explores how artists transform pain and loss.
Art
Messing with Museums and Our Desire for Order
Is the earth a necropolis in which the survivors live among the dead and their sarcophagi, which includes museums, pyramids, and monuments of all kinds?
Art
The Problems and Pleasures of an Activist Art Exhibition
I am often skeptical of protest art behind glass, yet I still cannot deny the pleasure of experiencing politically charged artworks in a venue making the effort.
Art
What Can We Learn From Italy's Early Leftist Modernists?
The artists in Staging Injustice: Italian Art 1880-1917 faced a real problem: how to represent injustices and project a hopeful vision of what changes were possible?
Art
Julia Fish's Architectural Abstractions Are Joyful Enigmas
Fish's artworks elude every attempt to enclose them in language, and they resist explanation. They become something only a painting can be.
Art
Why Joan Mitchell’s Paintings Can Never Die
Unlike the more celebrated painters around her, she didn’t resolve herself to working the same issues over and over; she kept asking herself other questions, pushing the paint to do what it had not quite done before.