Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Daumier, Art Spiegelman, stolen art, José Clemente Orozco, Batkid, transgender poetry, Chinese censorship, and more.
Weekend
Opinion
Weekend Words: Sell
This week, to keep a date at Christie's, a major painting skipped a major museum retrospective. That museum would be the Guggenheim, and the painting would be Christopher Wool's "Apocalypse Now" (1988): SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS. And sell it did.
Art
India’s Nasreen Mohamedi Belongs to Everyone
After the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima was called the “Japanese Godard” for what must have been the umpteenth time, he wittily replied by calling Godard “the French Oshima.” I thought of Oshima’s response once more when I went to Nasreen Mohamedi: Becoming One at the Talwar Gallery (September 13–November
Art
Jake Berthot Doesn’t Need To Be Original
For the past twenty years Jake Berthot has painted his vision of the Catskill Mountains, where he has lived since 1994, after living in Manhattan, much of it on the Bowery, for thirty years. A painter of what he calls “small sensations,” Berthot has included fourteen paintings and six drawings compl
Books
“Eye-Voices, a Choir”: New Translations of Paul Celan
The Romanian-born, German-speaking Paul Celan is one of the most translated poets in recent decades, and we’re still not through with him.
Art
Selected Secrets from a Disillusioned Generation
What is most important to us — as writers, thinkers, makers, and believers in the arts? What happens when the world we live in no longer feels like the one we knew? In a culture of disappointment, what do we need to continue making work? To continue believing in the work that we make?
Art
Tough, Raw and Paradoxical: Fabienne Lasserre's New Sculpture
Fabienne Lasserre makes objects she calls sculptures, but they could very well be paintings. They could also be remnants from a demolition site or detritus from a car bomb explosion.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Banksy charity sale is a bust, art and the 1%, looking at Norman Rockwell, opera's future, creating contemplative spaces in video games, underwear that masks smells, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Center
Can the Republican Party find a Savior from the Center?
Art
Francisca Sutil’s Method of Counting Time
Francisca Sutil is a Chilean abstract artist who lived in New York from 1977 until 1992, when she returned to Santiago, Chile, where she currently lives and works. She came to New York to study printmaking at Pratt Institute. In 1978, she discovered papermaking and, within a short time that included
Art
The World According to Wirsum
Do you ever wonder how stupid the New York art world can be? Well, if you don’t have enough proof, here is another example to add to your cache. Karl Wirsum at Derek Eller (October 12–November 16) is the artist’s first exhibition of recent work in New York since 1988.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Raoul Middleman
I met Raoul Middleman in Baltimore, and after stopping for fried oyster po’ boys and ginger ale at the Tooloulou Café, we drove to his studio-warehouse, a building that houses about seven thousand of his paintings. To call him prolific would be a major understatement.