Art
On Election Day, Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Endorsement of Hillary Clinton
Carrie Mae Weems presents the country as a place of division, a bubbling brew of hope and desperation and love and hate.
Reviews
Art
The Gift of Simplicity in America's Love Affair with the Shakers
The Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the emergence of 19th-century Shaker minimalism, and its influence on American Modernism.
Books
Illustrating the Greatest Bookstores in the World
Cartoonist Bob Eckstein illustrated 75 of the world's most beautiful, strange, and beloved local bookstores, many of which are in danger of closing.
Art
An Artist Hides His Critiques of the Mexican Government in Plain Sight
Caroles Amorales essentially infiltrated a newspaper by writing subversive articles that simulated the style and format of an average story or puff piece, without raising any red flags regarding censorship.
Art
Two Projects Revisit Historical Images with a Calm and Critical Eye
Two video installations currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago place the viewer within images and their history, and demand we look at them differently.
Art
At the Montreal Biennial, Lessons in How to Look
Across the city, many works by the 55 artists participating in the 2016 Biennale de Montréal deal with the possibilities, limitations, and consequences of spectacle and spectatorship.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Barrett Watten's ‘Questions of Poetics’
What is “language writing” anyway?
Books
The Great Kenward
Kenward Elmslie published his poems in Poetry magazine in 1960, and his first book, Pavilions, came out in 1961. Between then and now makes more than fifty years of work. And yet, in some ways, his writing cannot quite be contained by such definitions as “poetry” and “fiction.”
Art
Paintings We Need
In an era that celebrates celebrity, vulgar loudmouths, puerile provocateurs, selfie-addicts, and excessive materialists, Merlin James prefers subtlety over din, less rather than more.
Books
In a New Photobook, Stirring Memories of Man on the Moon
The Moon 1968-1972, an attractive new book containing photos from NASA’s Apollo Program, which 47 years ago landed the first men on the moon, evokes the rich mixture of emotion, yearning and speculation that have long surrounded Earth’s mysterious companion and neighbor.
Performance
Home Alone, With a Few Pills: Franz Xaver Kroetz's 'Request Concert'
With its task-based script, Request Concert may remind some of Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, tightly shot inside a small apartment. The pairing of everyday housework with suicide might also call to mind Marsha Norman's 1983 play 'Night Mother.
Art
Mary Carlson’s Favorite Demons
What does evil look like?