Music
Vampire Weekend's Formal Coup
Swiping tunes from all over the place and sampling everything from hip-hop to hippie folk, the new Vampire Weekend album demands exegesis.
Weekend
Art
Points of Contact: Small Works, Giant Steps
The Age of Small Things, a group show organized by the painter Chuck Webster, fills the ground floor of the Lower East Side’s Dodge Gallery, where the singular touch of the artist-curator has recast a parade of diminutive objects into an unpredictable unfolding of processes and ideas.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Super Bowl art bets, Carrie Mae Weems speaks, Central America's largest Mayan museum, Tibetan medical art, gay minimalism, writers and alcohol, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Glass
This week came the announcement that Google has teamed up with the country’s largest vision-care company in a deal that will offer subsidized frames and prescription lenses for Google Glass, a move that may hasten the popularity of wearable computers.
Books
Found Sounds, Found Stories: Andy Mister’s Liner Notes
Andy Mister’s recent book 'Liner Notes' captures the intimate texture of a consciousness that interacts with both the boring mundanity of an everyday work routine and the drug culture that, to some, is associated with an artist’s life.
Art
Weekend Studio Visit: Albert Contreras in Santa Monica, California
Albert Contreras, who was born during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as President, is a lean and cheerful man around eighty years old. He lives and works in a small apartment two blocks from the Pacific Ocean.
Art
Holly Solomon: For a Pop-Era Icon, an Extended 15 Minutes of Fame
Starting in the late 1960s, in the New York art world and internationally, Holly Solomon was for many a genuine star and maybe even, in Andy Warhol’s lexicon, a “superstar.”
Art
Gertrude Stein All the Time, Time, Time, and Time
If you are going to read Gertrude Stein’s titanic novel The Making of Americans — the Dalkey paperback is a little over 900 pages long — why not spare your eyes and have someone read it to you? This past weekend, the magazine Triple Canopy offered to do just that.
Art
All of the Above: Lori Ellison’s Dazzling Humility
Lori Ellison’s incremental, interdependent shapes well up across the surface of a page or panel, their rhythmic patterns at once contained and unmanageable.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, downtown performance insularity, best photographers in Asia, the value of arts education, charting the flight path of birds, a gay Russian response to Zhukova's racist chair photo, street style, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Bridge
This week, big bridge news: the replacement for the Tappan Zee will begin construction by the end of the year, and the longest bridge in New York State will, at eight lanes, become one of the widest in the world.
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (January 2014, Part 2)
In part 2 of this month, reviews of Beyoncé, Blood Orange, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Waxahatchee.