Art
Simple Pleasures
In his best works Cordy Ryman makes something visually arresting out of ordinary materials and paint — stuff you can buy in a hardware store.
Weekend
Art
Better Late Than Never
The art world did not begin to seriously deal with Jack Whitten’s merger of formal inventiveness and emotional content until the past decade, when he entered his seventies.
Art
Florine Stettheimer: Feminist Provocateur
A feminist, Florine Stettheimer understood the provocative nature of basing her compositions on the rarely seen female point of view as well as the significance of her choice to create an overtly feminine style.
Music
Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize
Whether or not he raised popular music to the level of literature — a meaningless claim lazy boomers have been pushing on the younger generation for years — he certainly assumed the role of the Romantic author-genius in a popular context and made the resulting dialectic thrilling as hell.
Books
Etel Adnan: Philosophy at Night
Lebanese-American artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan’s recent publication, Night, is in equal measure a series of meditations on intersubjectivity and spirituality, and a dialogue between prose poetry and short verse.
Art
Toy Story: Chris Macdonald’s Tabletop Sculptures
Is Macdonald trying to tell us that, in some important sense, artworks are toys — that there is no significant difference between the two categories of objects?
Art
The Work of Hands: Rachel Beach’s ‘Touchstone’
By foregrounding the schism between form and content, Rachel Beach is demonstrating the agitated unity of her handmade domain.
Art
Required Reading
This week, Hollywood's drug war, commodifying Banksy, don't trust Facebook, Trump's fear of architecture critics, picturing the migrant crisis, and more.
Art
Weekend Words: Deny
"Deny yourself! You must deny yourself! That is the song that never ends."
Books
Reader’s Diary: George Seferis's ‘Six Nights on the Acropolis’
George Seferis's mercurial tone can turn on a dime from lyricism to humor and back again, just as his characters shuttle between sensual abandon and neurotic self-flagellation.
Interview
No Rest Cures for the Wicked: An Interview with Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster
A psychoanalyst and cultural commentator, Jamieson Webster upends academic discourses on a daily basis.
Art
Weekend Studio Visit: Richard Hull in East Village, Chicago
There is something wonderfully incongruous about what Richard Hull calls his “stolen portraits.”