Interview
Artists Quarantine With Their Art Collections
“It is intriguing, what the mind selects to focus on (or seek refuge in) during a time of crisis.”
Weekend
Art
What’s So Hard About Painting Shakespeare?
Many paintings of Shakespearean scenes feel mawkish or literal-minded, flat-footed or lacking in emotional depth.
Art
Liu Xiaodong’s New York Diary
Even in this acute moment in our history, the artist is able to slow down his looking to find and celebrate the beauty of human determination.
Art
Required Reading
This week, museums and white supremacy, feminist art and the image of Aunt Jemima, reviewing a book about art and prisons, talking about reparations for Black Americans, a racist sculptor skit, and more.
Music
The Limits of a Rapper's Comedy
Lunging for the most obvious jokes on Find the Beat, Blueface is desperate to be heard and understood.
Art
Lorna Simpson's Cut-Up Portraits Evoke the Complexity of Identity
Composed of photographs culled from vintage Ebony magazines, the faces in these collages are reconstructed into new selves.
Art
The Moral Complexity of War Games
An-My Lê is a Vietnamese-born photographer who has portrayed — and participated in — re-enactments of the Vietnam War.
Art
Nature as Filtered Through a Screen
How do we experience eco-art online and what might it suggest about the nature of the digital gallery experience?
Art
The White Melting Pot
The work of Jiha Moon and Stephanie H. Shih is both aesthetic and political, a commentary on assimilation as a process in which one’s national origin is not forgotten or erased.
Art
Ying Li’s Ecstatic Landscapes
Li had to reinvent herself as a gestural painter in her 30s, after years of painting traditional ink-wash landscapes and Soviet-style propaganda.
Art
Required Reading
This week, John Bolton's late revelations; the difference between photography in books, exhibitions, and on screens; corporate profiteering off racism; architecture's coronavirus moment; and more.
Music
Reflections of America in Rap
Four new rap releases reflect the divided state of the nation.