Opinion
Weekend Words: Red
This week, attention returned to the red planet, where the robotic rover Curiosity sent back evidence of long-vanished rivers and lakes — and potentially life — on Mars.
Weekend
Books
Making Muses: Dorothy Iannone's Erotic Art Was Inspired by Dieter Roth
Dorothy Iannone describes her trip to Reykjavík in 1967 as the “journey which seems to have made all other journeys possible.” It was there she met the artist Dieter Roth, with whom she swiftly fell in love and for whom she left her husband and a comfortable life in the United States.
Art
Some Follow-up Thoughts on Michael Mazur (1935–2009)
In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, Pat Steir, at the Boston University Art Gallery, John Stromberg opens his essay, “Michael Mazur: A Delicate Balance” with this sentence: “Michael Mazur’s path to his recent paintings based on Chinese art has bee
Art
Stop and Smell the Smoke: El Greco and His Houdini Most High
El Greco came back from the dead. "The Greek," his real name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, moved to Venice and Rome before finally settling in Toledo, where he became one of Spain's most well known painters.
Art
Absolutely Modern: Robert Motherwell on Paper
In 1950, when the painter Robert Motherwell invented the phrase "The School of New York," he summed up its mission as "an activity of bodily gesture serving to sharpen consciousness."
Art
André Robillard Takes Aim at Cast-off Junk — and the Stars
In Europe, the self-taught French artist André Robillard is one of the best-recognized practitioners of this kind of art-making, although his achievements are still not so well known in the US, even among aficionados of outsider or self-taught art.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, art rising to the challenge of our times, Instagram CEO's insane statement, then Jeffrey Deitch's insane statement, Hans Ulrich Obrist is profiled, Miami's museums, purpose of Art Basel Miami Beach, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Tree
This week, The New York Times cheerfully reported on "the leafing of New York": the cityscape transformed by hundreds of thousands of trees planted over the past few decades.
Poetry
The Golden Mean: Dorothea Lasky and the Well-Adjusted Poem
Dorothea Lasky is the Ello of poetry. She gives us poems that are cute and zany, but on a clean, ad-free platform that is friendly, complex, and interpersonally sensitive. She is poetry’s golden mean between radical and legible, romantic and classical, interpersonal and impersonal: in other words, s
Art
Can I Be a Witness?
I have been thinking about the difficulty of characterizing Michael Mazur in part because, while he became highly celebrated as a printmaker, his paintings have never received nearly the same attention. Once a label is attached, it takes years to remove it.
Art
Not for Sale: Outside the Convention Center in Miami
MIAMI BEACH — “There’s a lot of product going on here,” I heard a woman say into her cell phone at the mega-art fair Art Basel Miami Beach 2014. Indeed, $3 billion worth of art is being offered for sale this year, according to the event’s organizers.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Judy Rifka
Judy Rifka and I met 10 years ago, when I was selecting a work of hers for an exhibition. Her studio was dense with paintings, a testament to how prolific and energetic she is.