Art
How Do You Say Goodbye to a Painting?
Titian’s “The Flaying of Marsyas” is among the most celebrated and disturbing images the Venetian master ever painted.
Weekend
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, goodbye, Gawker, Zombie Urbanism, Olympic medals for art, criticizing McMansions, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Evaporate
"If you slid Pluto to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice, and it would grow a tail. Now that's no kind of behavior for a planet."
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘The Brexit Crisis’
The presses roll fast when there are no presses to roll.
Books
America’s Philosopher Poet
The Swimmer is John Koethe’s tenth book of poetry. For many years, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee until he retired in 2010.
Art
The Other Side of History
One of the fascinating things about The Keeper, organized by Massimiliano Gioni, with Margot Norton, Natalie Bell, and Helga Christoffersen for the New Museum, is the sheer number of distinct collections they managed to include in a space that is not particularly hospitable to art.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Enrique Chagoya
I visited Enrique Chagoya in his Stanford University studio when classes were out for the summer. The bucolic fields outside the building were quiet, other than the rustling of tree branches, and a group of swallows and a hummingbird flying near the roof.
Music
World Music Doesn’t Exist: Aki Kumar, Lakuta, Metin Batur/Mamed Dzafarov, Choose Amore
There are critics out there made so uncomfortable by how foreign music is marketed to Western listeners, especially Europeans, that they’ve sworn off any sort of foreign style.
Books
Cosmic Wind: Yoshimasu Gozo’s 'Alice Iris Red Horse'
In 2003 I received an invitation to attend a reading by the poet Yoshimasu Gozo, someone I had never heard of. I asked around, and was told that Gozo was an avant-garde poet who read in a bygone oracular style.
Art
Roger Ricco, Artist, Has Something to Show You
Roger Ricco is an artist. He is also a steel-foundry worker’s son, a former rock-band promoter, and a co-founder and co-director, with Frank Maresca, of Ricco/Maresca, a well-known New York venue specializing in contemporary art by both schooled and self-taught artists
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, why we need art, art students today, office design in Tokyo, meth in North Korea, a 17th-century Turkish travel writer, writing the other, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Withdraw
"When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos."