Music
Solemnly Dinky High-Camp Bleepy: Chiptune Radio’s ‘Undertale’
Gliding and burbling, ringing and spattering and glitching, a lyrical escapism animates an album whose loveliness and silliness are inextricable.
Weekend
Performance
Detox, the Musical: Richard Maxwell's 'The Good Samaritans'
Richard Maxwell’s style can be off-putting or self-defeating, yet its virtues are manifest in this piece.
Art
Creature Discomfort: Art in the Cycle of History
It makes sense, at this most critical moment, to take a serious look at the art of the 1980s, its political fury and layered poetics, as an anchor in the storm.
Art
David Reed Did Not Go Along with Those Who Threw the Baby Out with the Bathwater
Making a brushstroke painting in the mid-1970s — a decade after Greenberg, Stella, and Lichtenstein gleefully presided over its burial — was foolhardy and brave.
Art
Required Reading
This week, all the art we don't see in museums, the Met Museum's problems, Tiny Trump takes off, what you need to know about 4chan, and more.
Art
Weekend Words: President
"I might be President by now if it weren't for this 'queer' thing."
Books
Reader’s Diary: The Potential Novel of a Conceivable Algeria
The 1950s through the mid-1970s were the great era of the unreadable novel. Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma was one of the first and most remarkable of these.
Music
Reestablished Forms: King, M.I.A., Young Thug, Sheer Mag
Erotic sagas are always political. This applies to the four albums reviewed below, several political despite themselves, each of which messes with established forms while representing desire.
Art
Jack Whitten’s Walls
Jack Whitten is the most relentless experimenter with materials in a generation of abstract artists who have yet to receive their due, perhaps because no one has come up with a catchy and marketable name for them, like the “Minimalists” or “The Pictures Generation.”
Art
The Studio Visit That Wasn’t Exactly a Studio Visit: Dan Devening, Mie Kongo, Peter Shear
It is not every day that you meet a self-effacing artist who makes no attempt to get you to see his work, but, in fact, points you to the work of others, only a few of which he shows.
Art
The Future
The more that our gaze is diverted from the monster of humanity, the more monstrous it becomes.
Art
Déjà Vu: Mark Williams’s Positive Echo
Mark Williams paints within the tradition of geometric abstraction and considers Agnes Martin, El Lissitsky, and Kazimir Malevich among his “art ancestors.”