Performance
An Operatic Lament for the Lonely Artist
"When we meet the very best, we have to give up," baritone Rod Gilfry intoned in The Loser, composer David Lang's one-act opera that debuted last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Reviews
Art
Totemic Tributes to the Obscured History of a Detroit Neighborhood
DETROIT — The history of the former municipality of Fairview is written in its streets.
Art
Artists Crank Up the Transcendent Power of Music
What is a DJ? Maybe you can get to an answer by understanding where the DJ is — that pivot point, that hub around which we as dancers oscillate, in the orbit of the music the DJ arranges and organizes.
Art
At the Portland Biennial, Artists Make a Case for Living on the Outskirts
PORTLAND, Oregon — “Now, you’re dead inside,” the gallery assistant said.
Books
How Photographs Have Shaped Our View of the National Parks
There were two prominent types of landscape photographs in the 1860s: Civil War battlefields strewn with the dead, and sweeping vistas of the West.
Art
Ugo Rondinone's Fragments of Nature Mourn the Environment
NÎMES, France — Ugo Rondinone’s zombie nature show Becoming Soil is an unintentional reminder that the terrifying Anthropocene age — when the human influence on Earth’s soil has been so profound it will leave its destructive legacy for millennia — is upon us.
Books
The Art of Psychological Testing
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a psychological test first published in 1943, doubles as an excellent poem.
Art
Building Public Trust Through Individual Promises
BOSTON — Paul Ramirez Jonas has challenged the idea of public space — and how it is demarcated from the private — throughout his 25-five year career of making highly formal participatory work.
Art
After Sunset, Phantoms of Montreal's Past Appear
MONTRÉAL — At sunset in the oldest streets of Montréal, ghosts of the city's past animate on its walls.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Henri Lefebvre's ‘Critique of Everyday Life’
The writings of Karl Marx will always remain a source of insight and inspiration, but vast swaths of the Marxist literature that exerted such a fascination when I was younger now seem barren of interest.
Books
A Forensic Poet for Our Time
What do you do, if you are a poet who has never “ been comfortable with autobiographical material?” Monica Youn’s poems brim with answers to this question that a younger poet might do well to notice.
Art
A Singular Enterprise
I have been doing my best to follow Marilyn Lerner ever since I reviewed her exhibition at John Good for Artforum (May 1989).