Music
From Melbourne with Love
Founded by conductor/saxophone whiz Andy Williamson, the Bombay Royale are eleven Australian troublemakers who play their own hammy, modernized style of Bollywood movie music.
Weekend
Poetry
The Beauty of Christopher Middleton’s Prose
A few years ago, in an essay called “Why I am a Member of the Christopher Middleton Fan Club,” I stated the need for “a selected prose that brings together all the different kinds of writing he has done." Loose Cannons: Selected Prose, which includes an insightful foreword by one of Middleton’s most
Interview
Beer with a Painter: David Humphrey
What I hoped to get from talking to David Humphrey were answers. The images in his paintings are zany, raunchy, and wild: a girl in a lawn chair holding monkeys by their scalps; a woman absent-mindedly marking another woman’s buttocks with daubs of paint; cats sitting beside slices of white bread pa
Art
Matisse’s Garden of Problems: The Cut-Outs at MoMA
The much-heralded exhibition of Matisse cut-outs currently at the Museum of Modern Art was previously at the Tate Modern, with a few less items than here, but it broke all attendance records and was open all night in its final days.
Art
“Tormented by Several Devils”: Théodore Rousseau’s Wild Styles
Consider “Study for The Forest in Winter at Sunset,” a work in oil and charcoal on brown paper by Théodore Rousseau, the 19th-century French painter now under scrutiny at the Morgan Library & Museum. Although it was done between 1845 and 1850, it feels like something Anselm Kiefer might come up with
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, an art project asks people to give away their data for a cookie, the first web brower turns 20, a child befriends Siri, slowing down in museums, the smell of old books, tea propaganda, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Tower
A new luxury condominium tower (104 units, $7,000,000-$95,000,000) under construction in Manhattan has just topped off at 1,396 feet — 150 feet taller than the Empire State Building.
Art
Hands On and Off: The Forest Fringe Festival
The Abrons Arts Center hosted the Forest Fringe Microfestival over the weekend of October 3. Forest Fringe originated at the Edinburgh Festival, a fringe within the Edinburgh Fringe, and has become internationally mobile as an independent entity.
Music
Bland in an Interesting Way
If the War on Drugs’s Lost in the Dream is a brilliant soft-pop masterpiece, a theory I am perfectly willing to entertain, it is brilliant in a way more suited to a platinum bestseller than to a critics’ record.
Art
Rainy Day Woman: Jane Wilson Re-Visions Reality
Some sixty years ago, when she was a young artist involved in the downtown New York City scene, Jane Wilson stopped trying to be an Abstract Expressionist.
Art
Robert Gober’s Unanswered Questions
The sprawling, high-ceilinged contemporary art gallery on the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art might have been built for Richard Serra, but Robert Gober owns it.
Art
The Way the World Ends: Jude Tallichet’s U-Turn
It’s a full-size Hyundai Accent, circa 2000, collapsed in the middle of the gallery floor. Or rather, the shell of one, bone-white and cracked apart, like a melting iceberg or a flash-frozen relic from the next ice age.