Art
“What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.” That’s how Alberto Giacometti summed it up, as told by James Lord in Giacometti: A Biography, published in 1997.
Opinion
This week, Ferguson, David Hockney and the avant-garde, Francis Bacon's "missing" exhibition, art in a mall, Persian calligraphy, naked in a Yves Klein sculpture, the infamous 19th-century "Ape Woman," and more.
Opinion
Recently, Cliff Bar announced the termination of its sponsorship of five professional rock climbers.
Art
Currently on view in the exhibition Jasper Johns: Sculptures and Related Paintings 1957–1970 at Craig F. Starr is “Book” (1957), a work I suspect many people either don’t know about or are not likely to have seen, even in reproduction.
Music
If Shabazz Palaces are the future of rap, as their label claims, then rap is bound for obscurantist whimsy — inventive and engaging though their records are, these proud bohemians have reached such a rarefied level of willful avant-garde perversity that it can take forever to hear how their musical
Art
Sam Lewitt is a young artist in a hurry. He was barely out of his twenties when he scored the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and right now he is filling both outlets of the Miguel Abreu Gallery — the modest space on Orchard Street and the immodest one on Eldridge.
Opinion
This week, the super-rich ruining museums, how an essay saved a Renaissance masterpiece, writing as commodity, stealing from Jasper Johns, social media as self-expression, and more.
Opinion
On Thursday, amNewYork reported that the annual SantaCon charity bar crawl will not be heading for Bushwick this year.
Books
While visiting Philadelphia a number of years ago, the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum asked me “Is Trevor Winkfield a real person?”
Art
There is something wonderfully incongruous and deeply disquieting about Gladys Nilsson’s art, which is primarily done in the medium of watercolor.
Music
Taylor Swift has become a megaplatinum superstar largely through the construction of an artificial but rather appealing character. To call her the girl next door would downplay the dizzy self-involvement and feisty autonomy that made her a star in the first place.
Art
Melvin Edwards' welded relief sculptures conjure up human anguish and human advancement often within the same work. His art delivers the mythmaking spirit of abstract sculpture into the domain of identifiable histories. He has built a long, wide-ranging career around that apparent incongruity.