Art
Required Reading
This week, the rich are hoarding, feminist performance art responds to rape, the story behind one of the most famous game show jingles, and more.
Weekend
Music
R.I.P. Ric Ocasek, Icon of Blankness
Whenever the chugging intro to “Just What I Needed” or “My Best Friend’s Girl” plays, fans of adolescent drama pump their fists and say yeah.
Art
A Painter Embraces Inauthenticity
Albert Oehlen has been a wild spirit from first to last.
Art
A Greenhouse for Extinct Flora
Michael Wang’s installation resembles an assisted living facility for plants.
Art
Pierre Soulages, Extreme Painter at 100
Soulages is not a reductive painter, but an artist who enlarges our sense of tradition by demonstrating the infinite potential of a single pigment.
Art
The Gnarly, Sassy Minimalism of Tom Doyle
Doyle's sculpture offers an opportunity to contemplate the beauty of pure form, but without a hint of nostalgia.
Art
How Happy I Am to Have Seen This Little Corner of America in a Museum
When it comes to the word “diversity,” what are we really referring to?
Art
In Praise of Painting’s Ambiguity, Part 4
Jasper Johns’s art has been accused of being cool, detached, aloof, and remote; nothing could be farther from the truth.
Art
Required Reading
This week, a history of Porgy and Bess, talking to Simone Leigh, Amy Sherald, and Lorna Simpson, history of the Art Institute of Chicago's lions, otters chasing a butterfly, and more.
Art
Yoko Ono, More Urgent Than Ever
At the Everson Museum in upstate New York, a mini-retrospective highlights the timeliness of the artist’s enduring humanistic and nature-focused themes.
Art
Damien Hirst, Turning In Circles
Hirst has been an erratic artist from the beginning, just as likely to fail as to succeed.
Art
Paintings with a Retinal Buzz
In Relative Brightness the canvas transforms into a rippling, luminous field of ever-shifting optical sensations.