Art
Painting in The Age of Anxiety
I have an innate distrust of work that has a whiff of nostalgia drifting off its surface, whether it is for Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, or, further back, Albert Pinkham Ryder.
Weekend
Art
Faithful to Putin, One Hundred Percent
Don't trust what you read. Don't trust what you see.
Art
A Master of the Flesh and Painter of the Soul
Ivan Albright represents a deeply transcendent, even Platonic, idea of the soul, although one could be forgiven for missing it among the mercilessly unglamorous bodies of his figures.
Art
Photography in Search of the Real
Real Worlds invites viewers to consider photography not just as documentation of myriad moments but as a means to more deeply understand lives and interpersonal relationships in Western cities.
Books
Who Really Owns the Elgin Marbles?
However we judge Lord Elgin’s original acquisition of the Parthenon sculptures, it’s easy to wonder whether the Turkish rulers legitimately had the right to allow him to dispose of these artworks.
Art
Required Reading
This week, a new micro-car in Europe, white nationalists misuse ancient history, Joan Jonas in London, a feminist history of food journalism, and more.
Books
A Writer’s Act of Divination
Selah Saterstrom proposes that the act of divinatory reading and the reading of a text are interchangeable, that a text is far more than a sequence of sentences.
Music
An Electropop Take on Romantic Rapture
The grand arc of Sophie’s bewilderingly titled Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides swings through a billion little moments of rapture, with sounds beautiful, ugly, extreme.
Art
The Ghosts of Our Future Climate at Storm King
A group exhibition featuring almost 20 artists suggests directions for visual art in response to climate change.
Art
What Would Grandma Do?
I’m glad Grandma never had to hear the President say almost every offensive word, at least once, on national TV.
Art
A Pioneering Thai Artist in America
Tang Chang's first solo US retrospective veers away from the criteria of progress and linearity according to which Western art is typically evaluated.
Art
A Pilgrimage to Art Brut’s Austrian Heart
An Austrian museum presents a wide-ranging survey of works made over almost 50 years by residents and other autodidacts associated with the Art Brut Center Gugging, near Vienna.