Art
The Mysteries of One, Two, Three
This is what a small group of people — most of them artists living in and around New York — know. Xylor Jane is a singular figure, and her widely spaced exhibitions are regarded as events.
Weekend
Books
Crossed Signals: Brian Evenson's Stories Blend Genre and Literary Conventions
Brian Evenson’s writing might well be, in the words of a character from his new story collection Windeye, published by the venerable Coffee House Press, a means of “capturing on paper and holding steady and immobile the various motions and bodies that constitute an event.” The twenty-five new storie
Art
Lucian Freud’s Wrong Turn
I recall the 1993-1994 Lucian Freud retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as possibly the dreariest exhibition I’d ever seen there.
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, photojournalists and defense contractors, whither Flickr, Michelangelo's fortifications, a guide to public art in NY this summer, Frank Gehry's chess set, artist lists and more.
Music
Fagen's Critical Catalogue (May 2012)
This week, reviews of Esperanza Spalding, Madonna, Black Dice, Spoek Mathambo, All-American Rejects, Rusko, Jack White and Chromatics.
Art
A Man Without a Camera
Marco Breuer is best known for the photographs that he makes without using a camera. (He does other sorts of photography, but this body of work is largely what we know about his endeavors). Rather than pointing at a moment that is gone, and wresting fixity from flux, as photographs are said to do, B
Performance
Dancing with Jack
Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson met in 2008. Both grew up in rural America, both are queer, both have created imaginary worlds. Two Alike, which premiered at The Kitchen last weekend, is their first collaboration, in which Swanson provides the setting for Ferver’s dreams and nightmares.
Art
Cosmic Comic: Frank Stella’s Fine Disregard
The first thing I noticed about Frank Stella’s classic “pinstripe” paintings from the late 1950s-early 1960s — gathered from hither and yon for the splendid exhibition, Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum and Copper Paintings — is how at home they looked in L&M Arts’ stately Upper East Side townhouse. The
Opinion
Required Reading: Barnes Museum Special
This week, critics weigh in on the new Barnes Foundation museum in central Philadelphia … and in other non-Barnes-related links … discotecture, progressive architectural ideas and the voice of Rene Magritte.
Books
Picture This: Sunandini Banerjee and the Book Illustrator’s Art
How do adjacent drawings or photos affect our reading experience as readers? What happens in the mind as we process both words and images? How do both tell a story together?
Art
A Truly Subversive Artist Is Not Necessarily Someone Who Is Theatrical or Gimmicky
If there is one constant about Thomas Nozkowski that I would single out, it is his lifelong insistence on subverting conventions. In 1974 he began painting on canvas board measuring 16 by 20 inches. (Let’s be clear here — Bill Jensen never painted on this small a surface because it had no historical
Art
The Daily Practice of the Impossible
Dana Schutz, who is in her mid-30s, belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in an epoch where painting was routinely thought of as a dead practice. One couldn’t just be a painter, because doing so would be to enter a dusty domain crammed with empty signifiers. It would mean you were doing s