Four captivating examples of the artist’s photographs, taken between 1973 and 1984, will be auctioned in August as part of Swann’s fourth annual LGBTQ+ Art, Material Culture, and History sale.
Susan Sontag
Posted inOpinion
Regarding the Pain of Others, on Social Media
While influencers market their brands using images of beauty ideals and upward mobility, grief accounts have started popping up, offering a different message.
Posted inBooks
Photography and Its Hidden Power
Patrick Nathan suggests that capitalism benefits when human relationships are reduced to two-dimensional representations.
Posted inArt
When Tragedy Strikes, Social Media Posts Can Become Invaluable Artifacts
As Notre-Dame burned, there was controversy over people responding by sharing selfies they’d taken at the cathedral. But there may be public value in this practice.
Posted inArt
Camp at the Met Museum: A Serious Fail at “Failed Seriousness”
The problem with the exhibition is that it’s simultaneously too self-aware and too clueless to capture the essence of camp.
Posted inArt
Yale Photography MFAs Smash the Thin Border Between Fiction and Reality
While shows like this one make the Yale-to-Chelsea pipeline seem all the more real, these artists have some serious skills.
Posted inPerformance
Hicks Meet Slickers and a Mesopotamian Sage: Sybil Kempson’s ‘Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag’
Sybil Kempson’s Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, in a world premiere run at the Abrons Arts Center through May 17, is the first production by her new theater company.
Posted inBooks
Mapplethorpe’s Other Man
In Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, Philip Gefter’s new biography of collector, curator, and market force Sam Wagstaff, the author argues that it was not only his subject’s life that was transformed by his relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.
Posted inOpinion
Shocker: Sontag FBI File Contains Comic Sans
The Freedom of Information Act request-processing website MuckRock has obtained and published Susan Sontag’s Federal Bureau of Investigation file. The document comprises 73 pages of letters and memoranda dating from 1968 through 1972, noting in mind-numbing detail the late intellectual’s various appearances in the press, her leftist advocacy, Vietnam war opposition, and political writings.
Posted inArt
The Private Life of Lorraine Hansberry: Letters, Lists, and Conversations
What excited me about the small exhibition currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum featuring a sampling of letters and lists from the writer Lorraine Hansberry — along with a wonderful audio recording of a conversation between her and Studs Terkel — was the way in which it showcased her voracious intellect.
Posted inArt
Representational Politics, Video Games & War
When it came to light that the newest release in EA’s Medal of Honor video game series contained a mode in which players could choose to fight as a group named the Taliban, and the US Army was understandably not too happy about it. After all, they had previously been cooperating on developing the game, allowing EA access to military equipment for rendering as well as aiding in the recording of sounds for the game. Yet the thinking behind this pressure from the Army and EA’s final decision to remove the game mode is more complicated than it seems.
Posted inArt
Wild Things Got Nothin’ on Matta (or Martin Renteria)
Cambridge, MA — I set out from my couch of the moment for some coffee since I am one of those murmuring morning people, the kind who requires a habit and a burnt tongue to prove to myself that I am, in fact, awake. On the short walk down the cramped sidestreets of residential Cambridge, I come face to face with the broad glass windows of Meme Gallery — a storefront space with yellow strings like spokes suspending a purple totemic figure above a basin of water, placed in the middle of the gallery floor. Fabric contortions billowed and oozed along the walls, nightmares leaking through dawn and ceiling tiles, down the gallery walls. Am I awake? What the hell is this?
