Art
Doug Aitken's Masterful Videos and Boring Sculptures
'Electric Earth' illustrates the difficulty of a sweeping retrospective by smashing excellent video work up against shallow sculpture.
Reviews
Art
The Suggestive Compositions of a Mediocre Caravaggist
The Metropolitan Museum's Valentin de Boulogne show clarifies why this French follower of Caravaggio remains lesser-known, despite the leering details in many of his paintings.
Art
Oskar Schlemmer's Prophetic, Dancing Robots
An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz highlights the German artist's paintings, drawings, choreography, and costume designs that imagine the integration of humans and machines.
Art
3D-Printing an Army of Forgotten Goddesses to Fight Colonialism
Morehshin Allahyari is developing a series of a dozen 3D-printed statues based on ancient images of forgotten, proto-feminist deities.
Art
A Chronicler of Philadelphia’s 20th-Century Black Life
Between the 1930s and '60s, John W. Mosley made photographs without any expectation that white people would see them. His intended audience was black.
Art
An Artistic Storm Fills a Formerly Abandoned Water Reservoir
Magdalena Fernández's art installation is the first to fill the Buffalo Bayou Cistern, a formerly abandoned 1920s water reservoir in Houston, Texas.
Art
Untying the Knots of History Around Japanese-American Internment
Orlaineta is concerned with unpacking history and sifting through forgotten objects in order to reconstruct a story.
Art
The Amorphous Taipei Biennial Tackles Nostalgia and Environmental Despair
Many of the individual pieces have merit, but the works neither shed light on one another nor enable a coherent dialogue.
Art
In the Darkness, Finding Rothko's Sense of Light
The confidence, for Rothko, is revealed through his insistence on the presence of the light, even though it may appear absent at the outset.
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘Bresson on Bresson’
Before starting to make films, Robert Bresson had been a painter. Or rather, he remained one, since according to him, “It’s not possible to have been a painter and to no longer be one.”
Art
Betsy Kaufman Takes the Grid to Task
Betsy Kaufman works out on paper what she is going to do in the painting — a series of distinct steps, each requiring complete control.
Music
It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: She & Him, Kacey Musgraves, Amy Grant, The Killers
Just like intimacy, holiday spirit exists simply because you believe it does. That’s why Christmas is so eternally rock & roll.