Opinion
Weekend Words: Meat
If we can now grow a hamburger in a test tube, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, we will still be able to get to the meat of the matter?
Weekend
Music
Fagen’s Critical Catalogue (May 2013, Part 1)
In part 1 of this month, reviews of She & Him, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Satinder Sartaaj, and Lady Antebellum.
Art
Geometry Under Pressure: Don Voisine’s Paintings
Don Voisine’s oil paintings on wood brim with all kinds of tensions: between flatness and spatiality; stasis and torque; containment and expansion; light and dark; tonal gradations and sharp contrasts; matte and glossy surfaces; transparency and solidity. Once you begin noticing the variety of stres
Interview
Beer with a Painter: John Walker
I have long admired John Walker’s work for its unique combination of tough materialism and romantic lyricism. I recently met him in his studio at Boston University, where he is the head of the MFA program. My visit with Walker happened to take place on the Thursday after the Boston Marathon tragedy,
Interview
Artist Exchange: In Conversation with Peter Acheson
This is an essay about communication and exchange between painters. It has to do with developing a shared language, and with exploring the nature and extent of our theoretical basis in painting.
Art
Flowers of Retrenchment: Anselm Kiefer's Alternate History
Anselm Kiefer has scaled back, way back, from his preposterously overproduced previous solo at Gagosian, but with Kiefer we are always talking about relative degrees of gigantism.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Bees
It's pollen season, big time, and Weekend Words turns its attention back to bees.
Books
“There can be no immigrants in utopia”: On “Haute Surveillance” by Johannes Göransson
Before we settle into our plush, faux-velvet seats, share bags of popcorn and watch the latest film about zombies who managed to escape from Pittsburgh and its parking lots, does anyone out there dream of making a movie about Jeffrey Dahmer starring Brad Pitt or James Franco?
Books
Manly Men and Their Discontents: Ben Jones's Men's Group: The Video
“Multiple paper sizes and stocks bound together with a spiral wire and wrapped between thick chipboard covers.” So reads the highly utilitarian description of Ben Jones’ new book in its accompanying press release, but it’s also as good a definition of the different incarnations of “manliness”—the pu
Poetry
Scrambled Sonnets, Prosthetic Limbs, and Little Bitter Teeth: Notes on Some Recent Poetry Publications
Ezra Pound said poetry was news that stays news. I thought that in gathering some notes on poetry I’ve read this year I’d bring a bit of news and only after doing so realized to what extent those notes would indicate how today’s poetry can be entwined with medieval Moorish Spain or fourteenth centur
Art
From Lynch to the Lynchian and the Dreams in Between
Hypnotherapy, a group show at Kent Fine Art, gives David Lynch fans a chance to revisit the iconic filmmaker’s alarming artwork a year after his solo turn at Jack Tilton. But that's only one, conspicuous though it is, of its strengths. What really matters is the opportunity to experience a museum-qu
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, a history of emoticons, Barocci in London, LA's architecture mess, the birth of the Garbage Pail Kids, William Eggleston and baseball, how China censors social media, and more.