Film
The Pink Cloud Is a Dark Sci-Fi Take on Quarantine, Made Before the Pandemic
Playing at the Sundance Film Festival, the Brazilian drama will make you wonder if writer/director Iuli Gerbase is a prophet.
Weekend
Art
Required Reading
This week, Dennis Cooper, white savior cinema, the maker of Bernie's mittens, a decolonial Qur’an, Ishmael Reed, and more.
Art
What a Painter Taught Me
Coming from a secular perspective, it seems strange to speak, in almost mystical terms, of being taken out of oneself.
Art
Martin Puryear’s Open Questions
To focus on Puryear’s devotion to craft and the handmade is valid, but now seems too narrow a view.
Art
The Melancholy Marriage of Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch
What do Emin and Munch have in common other than a burning desire to embrace, and be defined by, the miseries of life?
Books
Writing from Another World
Eric Baus’s sentences follow the rules of grammar, but something inexplicable happens by the time you reach the end.
Film
Pieces of a Woman Falls to Pieces
What begins as a trenchant exploration of losing a child becomes a Lifetime-esque affair that strays so sharply from a mother’s grief that it feels a bit like a betrayal.
Music
Playboi Carti’s Impressionist Rap
Carti’s willingness to disappear runs counter to the egotist individualism that has characterized rap since its inception.
Art
Required Reading
This week, Lorna Simpson's Rihanna collages, a fascism historian gives us some perspective, unlocking Bitcoins, Lou Stovall, archived Parler videos from the DC insurrection, and more.
Books
Poems in the Language of Death
Paul Celan’s truest homeland, paradoxically, was the German language — the language of the Nazis who imprisoned him in a forced labor camp and murdered his parents.
Art
The Independent Spirit of Herbert Gentry
Gentry was one of a number of Black artists who had to navigate the art world’s demand to emphasize their racial identity in the “right” way.
Art
Rudy Burckhardt’s Innocent Eye
Burckhardt was never surreptitious; he did not hide his camera, and his subjects often knew they were being photographed.