Opinion
Required Reading
This week, "smart dumb" is a thing, High Line shenanigans, Martin Scorsese talks cinema aesthetics, the charitable-industrial complex, every movie reference in The Simpsons, and more.
Weekend
Opinion
Weekend Words: Ditch
It was only a matter of time before MOCA ditched Deitch.
Art
Patrick Strzelec’s Sculptures Are in the Middle of an Improbable Thought
In drawing, a line need not become a contour or an image. In sculpture, this resistance to becoming is harder to pull off. For all their insistence on pure abstraction, Donald Judd makes boxes and Richard Serra makes steel fortresses. The problem is that this kind of sculpture smacks of signature sh
Art
Single Point Perspective: Munk and Me
In Loren Munk’s painting "An Attempted Documentation of Williamsburg, 1981-2008” (2008-2011), I recognized a slice of my own history in a place I had known well. After a lifetime of looking at paintings, this experience was oddly new to me.
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (July 2013, Part 2)
It's Alternarock Week at Critical Catalogue Headquarters with reviews of the Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, Adult, and Laura Marling.
Art
Great Outdoors: The Biennial of the Americas in Denver
In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard envisions the house as a "vertical being," with two symbolic poles: the irrationality of the cellar and the rational consciousness of the roof. “Up near the roof, all our thoughts are clear … Here we participate in the carpenter’s solid geometry.” The same can b
Opinion
Under Construction: Engaging with Art from the Ground Up
WILLIAMSTOWN, MA — After a while it felt like a barrage: a darkly rendered animation set in a psychiatrist’s office and a gigantic space station; a Chinese labor camp investigation enacted by singing puppets; a film featuring a Depression-era Kansan doctor, goat testicles and the world’s most powerful radio
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Žižek weighs in a global protest, Walker Evans at MoMA, political cartoons, Smithsonian's space problem, Faulkner sues Woody Allen, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Name
In light of J.K. Rowling's undercover success, Weekend Words wonders, what's in a name?
Art
Who Is Geneviève Asse?
PARIS — At ninety, the painter Geneviève Asse is one of France’s national treasures, though France has yet to fully celebrate that fact, as it has with Pierre Soulages, who is four years her elder. A postage stamp with her profile in front of one of her abstract paintings has been issued (Soulages a
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (July 2013, Part 1)
In part 1 of this month, reviews of the So So Glos, Portugal the Man, Deafheaven, and Kanye West.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Glenn Goldberg
I met Glenn Goldberg in 2005 when I was curating an exhibition about the history of the New York Studio School. Goldberg’s tools-in-trade are elemental: dots, patterns, and symbolic, iconic representations of birds, trees, flowers. They couldn’t be more different from the traditions of the Studio Sc