Art
Confronting Our Existential Dilemmas in a Live-Simulated Fantasy World
For Emissaries, Ian Cheng designed three self-playing video games that take place on a fictitious volcanic island.
Reviews
Music
The Intentional Fallacy Is Evil: Festival Anthems, Fifty Shades Darker, Workout Motivation, 35 Hits from the ‘70s & ‘80s
With any number of noncanonical, shelf-filling compilations released on the market every day, the failure to review them makes sense, as they're rarely any good — but rarely doesn’t mean never.
Books
Crosscutting Tales: Donald Breckenridge's Novel And Then
Satisfying both on the level of story and style, And Then is a thoughtful meditation on the residue that remains: the ghosts that people our lives, the dead we cannot forget.
Art
Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s Spring and All
I cannot think of another artist devoted to nature who chooses such unlikely, decidedly plain, almost unsightly views, but never makes that act the point of the painting.
Art
Don Voisine Makes Geometry Sexy
Every color in a Voisine painting has its own material identity. Even the narrow bands edging or running through the panel’s border colors convey a distinctive feel to their physicality.
Art
Inquiry Meets Imagination in Jen Durbin's "Jackie Series"
In a series of drawings derived from frames of the Zapruder film, Durbin tracks the shifting spatial orientation of Jackie Kennedy's pink pillbox hat — and by implication, Mrs. Kennedy's bodily response to the unfolding horror.
Art
Easy Does It: The Slow Surprises of Stanley Whitney
Best known for arranging blocks of thrumming color into large rectangular canvases, Whitney’s major achievement has been to spark a slow burn of surprises, within the least esoteric medium around, large-scale oil painting.
Books
Molly Nesbit Chases the Big Ideas
“I’m interested in how ideas function in the world, in questions of practice, not just theory,” Nesbit told me. “I’m not interested in theory per se, but rather in thinking.”
Art
The Feminist Avant-Garde, Now More than Ever
Their only solution was to make their revolution their own way, without help and without precedent.
Art
Botticelli's Venuses and Our Enduring Need for Beauty
The Botticelli exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, so filled with the hopes and ambitions of the Renaissance, seems especially timely in our deplorable political moment.
Art
A Steve McQueen Video Ponders the Vulnerability of a Young Man’s Life
The artist and filmmaker's two-channel video piece "Ashes," having its US debut at the ICA in Boston, forces the viewer to reconcile disparate scenes projected onto either side of a suspended screen.
Performance
A New Play Celebrates the Lesbian Kiss that Scandalized Broadway in 1923
Indecent, by Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichman, presents Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance as a triumphant, defiant showcase of queer love far ahead of its time.