Art
David Lynch Returns to His Roots in Philadelphia's Urban Decay
PHILADELPHIA — Before summoning unsettling images of horror out of the American everyday on film, David Lynch was a visual art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Reviews
Books
New Art Book Plays with Scale
Big Art/Small Art by Tristan Manco, out later this month from Thames & Hudson, is an attempt to see what size means to art in the 21st century.
Books
Picturing the Transfigurations of Fashion
“Fashion” can be characterized as many things: a business, a craft, a lifestyle. At its core, though, it’s a visual culture that embodies one very important quality: transfiguration.
Art
Making Sense of a Biennial of "Makers"
NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial is the closest thing you’ll find to a crowd-sourced exhibition on view in New York right now — perhaps anywhere.
Art
Martin Scorsese Celebrates a New York Literary Institution
The 50 Year Argument, Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about The New York Review of Books, uses the same opening-sequence footage as another film about life in the Big Apple: West Side Story.
Art
A Tibetan Artist's Political Pop
HONG KONG — In his new show at Pearl Lam Galleries in Hong Kong, contemporary Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso uses traditional Tibetan landscape themes and iconography, but also tchotchkes, bricolage, cartoon bubbles, and stickies, all of which serve as cheery subterfuge for the dire messages he buries
Books
Contemporary Art's Body Language
The Figure: Painting Drawing and Sculpture, Contemporary Perspectives has the look of a high-end coffee table decoration, but don’t judge this book just by its Martha Mayer Erlebacher cover.
Art
Rediscovering the Roots of Black Radical Brooklyn
The energetic, jumbled print design of funkgodjazz&medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, an exhibition by Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center, strikes a bright, funkedelic chord in the mind’s eye. This is jazz; this is the casting off of the master’s linguistic tools; this is a celebration
Art
Expo Chicago 2014 Fails to Inspire
CHICAGO — The common consensus about Expo Chicago 2014 is that it was a success. One hundred and forty galleries from across the globe (more than in the previous two years of the art fair’s reincarnated existence) set up their stalls in the Navy Pier exhibition hall.
Art
Marcel Duchamp Paints the Body Electric
PARIS — A nomadic but steady hand is clearly sensed in Marcel Duchamp's work. He is often an excellent painter. But it is also true that with Duchamp's legacy of conceptually anti-retinal art (and anti-art), there is something so pregnant with free-floating information that it electrifies and upsets
Music
Magnum Opus Cycnorum
Swans, led by one Michael Gira, are the only band around right now to combine the abrasive militancy of classic American noise rock with mind-boggling avant-garde imagination.
Art
What the Heck Is Going On in Angela Dufresne’s New Paintings?
In the foreground of the painting, “Dwarf, Goat, Woman, Man and Head” (2014), a young woman in a striped red and blue bikini is standing in a forest, where it has recently snowed, multitasking. She cradles a decapitated head in the crook of her left arm, while, with her right hand, she is about to p