Art
Two Cy Twombly Exhibitions Marry Myth and Sensual Abstraction
By a playful amalgam of semiotics with scatology, Twombly redevised history painting into palimpsest poop.
Reviews
Art
The Loving, Self-Deprecating Comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Robert Crumb
An exhibition at David Zwirner brings together the artist couple's individual and collaborative autobiographic comics.
Film
A Documentary About China's Coal Mining Industry Fuels Western Biases
Zhao Liang's Behemoth is another instance of viewing China from a Western perspective — one that is quick to demean and infantilize Chinese citizens as incapable of governing themselves.
Film
A Search for Love and Safety in LGBTQ Nightclubs
When Adomako Aman decided to make Dancing in the Dark, he was seeking solidarity with “other gay men, especially gay men of color” who could share in his experience.
Art
When an Exhibition Leaves You Feeling Like an Idiot
Alivia Zivich, a co-curator of the chaotic exhibition Eric Schmid is an Idiot, likened the experience of putting the 80-something artist show together to "tying loose strings to other loose strings."
Art
Miniature Military Drones Decorated in a Pakistani Folk Art Tradition
Mahwish Chishty projects Pakistan’s folk art traditions against the blank flanks of America’s weapons of war, subsumed by the very culture they target.
Art
In Paintings and Ceramics, Theaster Gates Salvages Charged Materials
In his new show at Regen Projects, Gates showcases paintings based on data visualizations by W.E.B. Du Bois and ceramic sculptures that reinterpret iconic forms.
Art
How Art Making Is a Type of Management
The Visible Hand looks at how artists themselves build institutions, are managers, and are very much a part of and influenced by the systems their work moves through.
Film
An Insider's View of the Life and Death of a Brooklyn DIY Venue
A new documentary about Death By Audio, a beloved music venue in Williamsburg that was forced to shutter in 2014, over-relies on the reminiscences of the people involved with the space.
Art
The Power of Protest Art and the Dignity of the Protester
An exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem about organized protests asks if they can push us to recognize our shared humanity.
Books
Reader's Diary: The Monastery Door Is Open
Pierre Reverdy’s novel The Thief of Talant is not a novel at all, but a long poem or sequence with elusive narrative underpinnings.
Books
The End of the World as We Know It
The Nuclear Culture Source Book considers the “lived experience of the uncanny nature of radiation” ushered in by disasters such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima.