Opinion
Weekend Words: View
"The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
Weekend
Books
Reader’s Diary: Kevin Young's ‘Jelly Roll’
So many poets out there.
Art
Better Days
In 1987, Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark began investigating the possibilities of generating a Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) that would, among other things, enable a computer to encode, transmit, and translate one language into another.
Art
Fault Line
The first paragraph of Lev Manovich’s groundbreaking essay, “Database as Symbolic Form” (1999) came to mind about three minutes after I began pouring over the weird, wacky, wild and wooly stuff displayed under glass in Tony Oursler: The Imponderable Archive at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Books
Knowing Better: Brian Blanchfield's Essay Collection 'Proxies'
The 25 essays in Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies are erudite and intensely personal, deftly traversing the distance between the intellectual and the corporeal, between the meditative and the resolute.
Art
Street Art Is a Period. Period. Or the Emergence of Intermural Art
Let’s start off with a clear contention. Street Art, as I see it, is a period.
Art
In Switzerland, Art Brut Goes Back to Its Roots
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — The roots of art brut, as a field of research, may go back a century or more, effectively (if perhaps unwittingly) tracing the evolution of this unusual art genre in parallel with but separate from that of modern art.
Art
Contemplating Perfection and Imperfection at Dia:Beacon
A visit last weekend to Dia:Beacon, the vast repository of Minimalist art on the east bank of the Hudson River, brought home once more the complexities and contradictions of a movement whose goal was to be as plain as the nose on your face.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Orbit
"Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making."
Books
Reader’s Diary: Rana Dasgupta’s ‘Capital’
My all-too-brief visit to Delhi last year ignited in me a desire to learn about the history of India.
Books
Killed By the State
A few weeks ago, while I was reading In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, edited by Reginald Shepherd and Philip Clark, I was reminded of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad. This happens with poetry – one poem or book leads to another, l
Art
An Artist Who Possessed a Third Eye
Working in painting, drawing, assemblage, film, photography, photograms, performance, collage, and printmaking, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) made more discrete bodies of work across more mediums than any other postwar artist.