Art
Jenny Holzer’s Blowtorch in the Darkness
When going too far is barely enough.
Weekend
Art
Required Reading: Women's March Posters
The largest protests in US history took place yesterday, and people's sign creativity was on full display.
Art
Weekend Words: Lies
"Truth exists; only lies are invented."
Books
Reader’s Diary: The Importance of Being a Simile
Although the poetry in Geoffrey Nutter’s Cities at Dawn is almost always calmly descriptive, whatever it describes is somehow something else and not itself.
Books
The Omni American Author: An Albert Murray Collection
Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs opens with a seminal piece, The Omni-Americans. In 1970, Murray took on black protest writers and defied establishment thinking with his claims of “a folklore of white supremacy and a fakelore of black pathology.”
Music
A Tribe Called Quest's Communal Monument
A communal monument to one rapper that also celebrates community in the context of political horror (they didn’t predict the election either). Phife, inevitably, becomes a symbol. So does the whole Tribe.
Art
The Nocturnal Worlds of Katherine Bradford
In this exhibition, it struck me that what Katherine Bradford keeps getting better at is incoherence: she can meld divergent details without coming across as contrived or arbitrary.
Art
Progress Report: Marina Adams’s Recent Paintings and Gouaches
This is Marina Adams’ breakthrough show. There is nothing formulaic about her use of color, line or shape. The paintings are eccentric, but do not feel willfully so.
Art
Schlongface
I am HORRIFIED.
Art
America Is Trembling: Jean Genet’s Answer to Donald Trump
Jean Genet believed that money was inherently evil and the quest for power was a form of necrophilia.
Art
Batman for President and the American Political Imaginary
Batman, we might say, created the space in the American political imaginary for a President Trump.
Performance
Theater of Machines: Rimini Protokoll and CVRTAIN
Two of this year's performance offerings, perhaps inadvertently, highlighted the sometimes awkward and asocial embrace of technology.