Arts & Letters Daily search results for “art” (566)
2016-03-11 | Art and politics. Art made submissive to politics is unhealthy for both. The critic's task is to find the edge where art meets the world more »
2022-01-19 | Art crimes are as old as art itself. But the FBI's Art Crime Team is fairly new — and busier than ever more »
2011-01-01 | Lying and art spring from a common impulse: to escape reality. Art is in fact a kind of lying, and lying a form of art more »
2022-01-14 | Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? Such questions promote a narrow view of what art can do more »
2020-05-18 | “Art breathes from containments and suffocates from freedom,” said Leonardo da Vinci. Contemporary art is suffocating more »
2018-05-25 | Aesthetically empty and running on a broken business model, art fairs are bad for art. Jerry Saltz on the menacing art-fair industrial complex more »
2011-01-01 | Leo Steinberg, art historian, critic, provocateur, raconteur, has died more »
2021-06-15 | Art galleries and auctions can feel like intimidating, insular places. Here’s how to successfully buy art more »
2010-01-01 | Can video games be works of art? BioShock has aesthetic qualities and expresses emotions: crushing peril, tenderness, surprise, awe. Why not call it art? more »
2015-10-17 | Words are not up to the task of describing visual art. To experience art, focus on seeing, not telling more »
2015-05-01 | Libraries, museums, concert halls: Silence once reigned when art was consumed in public spaces. Now art has been democratized - as measured by hubbub and laughter more »
2016-02-12 | Dismissing art as “pretentious" often reveals the accuser’s own anti-intellectual snobbery. Ambitious art merits better treatment more »
2017-12-09 | Campaigns against "cultural appropriation" are bad for politics and bad for art. To put identity over aesthetics is to render art meaningless more »
2023-06-05 | Poetry, properly understood, is the total art form, from which all other modern art forms emerged. Want proof? Consider Nick Cave more »
2013-07-25 | Your taste in art ? Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh ? far exceeds your budget. What to do? Call Susie Ray, master of the art of deception more »
2013-08-06 | Art and authenticity. Forgeries today are considered cheap knockoffs, at their best exposing the ignorance of art critics. That was not always the case more »
2010-01-01 | Journalism is reductive, says David Hare. Art opens up reality to us, making it deeper, thicker, more surprising. Art never tells you what you already know more »
2016-08-16 | Walter Benjamin believed that great art contains an inexplicable "aura," an element of mystery. Now forensic science is ruining the romance of art history more »
2016-09-13 | Against art history. It’s obsessed with obscure formalist twists, micromovements, and jargon-laden intellectualism. Real art is bigger than all that more »
2018-09-05 | Modernism and the middle class once ruled the art world. No longer. The firewall between art and money has been abandoned more »
2022-09-15 | Too many people want the repatriation of art to do something art can't do: redress grievances, salve shame, absolve guilt more »
2022-02-22 | Spotify, Kindle, and other vehicles for digital art have deprived us of one of life’s great joys: the lost art of browsing more »
2022-03-14 | What mattered most in art was the idea, not the execution, insisted Man Ray. This view gave rise to a century of lousy art more »
2013-11-13 | Art became philosophical in 1964, when Andy Warhol erased the line between art and reality. For Arthur Danto, it was a conversion moment more »
2013-11-15 | What of today's art will last? What will future critics be able to label ?age-defining?? Keep in mind: Age-defining art can be really, really bad more »
2012-08-16 | Robert Hughes had an aversion to pretense and a knack for the withering putdown. He tried to save art from the art world more »
2019-05-27 | Art criticism is art. It makes meaning out of the seemingly indecipherable, elucidating existential stakes. No one does this better than Peter Schjeldahl more »
2022-09-21 | "Art either captivates the public or it doesn’t, and the same, it would seem, is true of art heists" more »
2021-09-24 | Organizing a bookshelf imposes order and intimacy on objects of art. What happens when all of our art and culture is stored digitally? more »
2012-08-17 | Punk tactics and political art. Ai Weiwei shows that one man can shame a state, that art can undermine propaganda and become the conscience of reform more »
2012-08-18 | To understand art, it helps to understand the mind, says Eric Kandel. "I see psychoanalysis, art, and biology ultimately coming together" more »
2011-01-01 | Bribery is an art, and the art business in China - rife with forgeries, crooked scholars, corrupt auction houses - is brush-stroked by bribes more »
2017-06-17 | It’s one thing to preserve a painting, quite another to preserve art made from bologna or bubble gum. Should art be made to last? more »
2016-08-11 | Propaganda art is crude, primitive, and inferior to real art. Except, of course, when it isn’t. Consider the career of Jacques-Louis David more »
2011-01-01 | 'W.H. Auden: "it''s rather a privilege/amid the affluent traffic/to serve this unpopular art." Monica Jones chose to serve the art of Philip Larkin' more »
2018-10-17 | Sotheby's and spectacle. Banksy’s autoshredding stunt reinforces how contemporary art is not so much about art but the documentation of an event more »
2019-07-08 | Art and finance have a natural affinity and a longtime connection. Investors, in giving rise to modern and contemporary art, shaped the overheated market of today more »
2022-06-28 | What is the art world and why does it exist? At the most basic level, to answer the question: Is it art? more »
2022-01-19 | “Art’s not a commodity,” held Donald Judd, a mainstay of the art town Marfa, Tex. Now the place confronts the NFT craze more »
2022-02-23 | Salvador Dalí had a pet ocelot. Judy Chicago was rejected from art school. What’s the value of art-world trivia? more »
2023-05-02 | For Murakami, art is not always about art, though it is about discipline. His daily goal: write 1,600 words more »
2023-05-22 | Art critics seem less and less interested in art and more and more interested in money. Consider the triumph of Kehinde Wiley more »
2023-06-19 | “Imitation and style, which modernists had rejected from art theory, are coming back to art practice through the window of technology” more »
2014-10-20 | Who was Margherita Grassini Sarfatti? Art collector, editor, malicious gossip, Fascist propagandist. And Mussolini's Jewess more »
2013-10-17 | Does the instantaneity of texts and tweets trump serious art and writing? A film critic's investigation more »
2010-01-01 | Great museums take us deeper into works of art, and deeper into ourselves. Albert Barnes knew this. Moving his museum to Philadelphia is a crime against his art - and his museum more »
2016-10-13 | From the painter Thomas Kinkade’s cozy little cottages to the flowerbeds of Mary Oliver’s poetry, sentimentality is a plague for art — Christian art in particular more »
2015-06-11 | Art in a time of tyranny. Most art produced under the Third Reich has been destroyed or hidden. Is it time to give those pieces a museum of their own? more »
2018-01-16 | “Literature has only done harm to art,” thought Degas. When looking at a painting, he advised, don’t read the label or the critics. Simply let the art itself speak more »
2012-12-07 | For the past 700 years, banking and art have shaped our understanding of value, speculation, and profiteering more »
2014-07-19 | What did Keats think of Milton? Shakespeare of Ovid? The imperfect, rewarding, highly conjectural art of reading as someone else more »
2014-08-20 | In an age of constant status updates, what becomes of art forms ? like literary memoir ? that thrive on concealment? more »
2013-12-09 | ?Art breathes from containment and suffocates from freedom,' said Leonardo. Skeptical? Consider Marianne Moore's appallingly circumscribed life more »
2013-05-01 | Here's the thing about being a persecuted artist: Everyone wants to talk about everything but your art. Salman Rushdie explains more »
2013-06-03 | Once transgressive, revolutionary, anti-authority, street art now is the establishment. Did the artists grow up or sell out? more »
2011-01-01 | On the New York art scene, the avuncular, ubiquitous Irving Sandler is Herodotus, Livy, and Thucydides rolled into one more »
2022-01-29 | The social meaning of art goes beyond academics’ dispassionate theorizing. Rita Felski explains more »
2016-09-24 | The genius of Duchamp’s “Fountain.” His porcelain urinal is more than a cultural oddity. It is both art and non-art, a self-referential philosophical paradox more »
2022-07-16 | “The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the … blinkered project of leading a life” more »
2014-06-10 | In praise of bean counters. Accounting once occupied the attention of thinkers in religion, art, and philosophy. Yes, accounting more »
2014-11-18 | Whether tapered, snout-like, or hooked, the Jewish nose displays a remarkably diverse history in Christian art more »
2014-12-03 | Hans Ulrich Obrist ? super-curator, data gatherer, gadfly of the European art circuit ? is afflicted with wanderlust and logorrhea more »
2014-12-19 | For Robert Burns (haggis), Virginia Woolf (sausage, haddock), and Emily Dickinson (Black Cake), appetite was important to art more »
2014-01-10 | Three trends in art ? technology, abstraction, conceptualism ? opened the door for dilettantes and amateurs, so Julian Baggini walked right in more »
2017-04-18 | Good monsters, like good art, replace conventional ideas with something weird, troubling, and potentially heroic more »
2011-01-01 | A Russian art collective is under arrest. Its crime? Staging a public orgy at a Moscow science museum more »
2019-10-07 | Against street art. "Kitsch, contrived and uninspiring," it is "the act of an entitled, middle-class narcissist" more »
2022-01-26 | Virtual reality promises to deepen immersive experiences of art. But there’s still value in unplugging more »
2021-10-12 | The art of dark persuasion. What causes sensible people to do things they might not otherwise do? more »
2023-06-20 | For Lorrie Moore, writing is not for processing trauma or healing from pain. It is for art more »
2012-08-16 | When it comes to the relationship between art and morality, Walter Benjamin put it best: "At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism" more »
2018-08-14 | “Relevant” is one of the great nonsense words in art, says Jay Nordlinger. The best art doesn't speak to our time. It speaks for all time more »
2017-12-01 | On bias against women in art. Louise Bourgeois knew just about everyone in the art world by the 1940s yet didn’t become famous until the 1980s more »
2018-01-29 | Joni Mitchell's authenticity is quintessential. But authenticity in art is, of course, also an aesthetic effect. And her art was a product of artifice as much as honesty more »
2021-03-09 | A sense of so-called “decency” long kept women out of art studios. Indeed, the history of art is "the history of many women not receiving their dues” more »
2012-12-27 | Dave Hickey is a genius, a cantankerous, chain-smoking, art-critic kind of genius who detests collectors, museums, and academe more »
2013-09-23 | Taste in textiles matters. Fashion is a lens on the history of civilization, says Francine Prose. But is it art? more »
2011-01-01 | Populism has crept into the high-art world, so that museum-going now provokes vexing bouts of intellectual insecurity more »
2017-01-03 | John Berger, art critic, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, counterculture celebrity, cattle herder, is dead. He was 90 more »
2016-03-12 | Whether "idiot optimist" or "art in every sense," Mickey Mouse, at 90, is American cinema's most durable icon more »
2011-01-01 | Agnes de Mille democratized ballet, injecting a dose of pop-art cheekiness into the ordered, insidery world of formal dance more »
2018-09-13 | What happens when two fiercely clever controversialists, skilled in the art of mandarin invective, clash on national TV? more »
2023-01-07 | Environmental activists are targeting works of art in protests. Are they justified? Peter Singer makes the case more »
2022-08-31 | Books are boring, movies are boring, art is boring. Blame the internet for our era of cultural malaise more »
2022-03-02 | Stephen Crane’s life followed his art. His dreams became real — and then became nightmares more »
2013-11-09 | Shunga, erotic Japanese art, flourished amid 18th-century brothels, Kabuki theaters, and teahouses. To look at the artworks today is to confront the thin line between art and pornography more »
2015-06-01 | Far too much art is locked in the warehouses of a handful of museums. What happened to the goal of getting more people to look at more art to get more out of it? more »
2020-04-25 | For Manet, in art “you must constantly remain the master and do as you please. No tasks! No, no tasks!” And yet art is a task more »
2020-07-11 | As Martin Amis wrote, art “celebrates life,” increasing “the store of what might be lost.” Can art — at the same time — lament what will be lost in climate change? more »
2013-12-09 | The upper reaches of the art world are marked by an absence of principle, taste, and embarrassment, says Jed Perl. Art is now a fantasy object for the rich more »
2017-05-12 | Since Hegel, philosophers have declared the end of art, meaning that no further progress is possible. In that sense, it’s a good thing: Art is now free to be anything more »
2016-08-25 | The Greek Attalids purchased an entire island just to steal its art. J. Paul Getty spent lavishly on art he would never see. What motivates collectors? more »
2011-01-01 | Art is beauty, expression, and energy in a form that emerges in its own time and on its own terms, says James Panero. So is the frenetic life of the web compatible with decent art criticism? more »
2011-01-01 | Scientists offer evolutionary explanations of why we savor art and story-telling, but science will never give us the intense emotional experience we get from art. Brian Boyd explains more »
2016-12-14 | In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru. His novel about the experience, a tale of political ambition and moral decay, is art imitating life imitating art more »
2020-03-21 | “Advertising was like art, and more and more art was like advertising. … Ideally, the only difference would be the logo.” So it went at the Warhol Factory more »
2018-07-07 | The lone male artist has often been taken as a genius; the lone female artist as a muse or “art monster.” But art does not have to be masculine or feminine more »
2022-11-07 | Bill Deresiewicz: "Wokeness flattens art, and it seeks to flatten our response to art. It wants us all to have the same response to any given work” more »
2012-08-18 | Th' Dustiest of Th' Dustbowlers. Woody Guthrie's "aw, shucks" persona was both genuine and a masterly work of performance art more »
2013-07-10 | ?What is beauty anyway?? said Picasso. 'There's no such thing.' Can we distinguish the man's art from his posturing? more »
2014-09-26 | So we give up the pleasures of entertainment for the seriousness of art? Not even Henry James would agree more »
2014-02-11 | Gabriele D?Annunzio, in a hedonistic, Nietzschean, cocaine-induced fury, trampled Italian art and politics. Can he be forgiven? more »
2017-04-18 | Should public art be affirmative? Kara Walker makes provocative, monumental works that challenge the idea more »
2015-04-15 | Alone together. Every new technology generates anxiety - and art - about its isolating effects: Witness Cocteau, Hopper, and now, Ryan Trecartin more »
2016-04-19 | Authenticity is overrated. It's pretense and flagrant artifice that create culture. We'd have no art without it more »
2022-07-21 | Great patrons of art used to be rich individuals. Then a new patron arose: the American corporation more »
2022-04-02 | The art world is alive with testimonies that blast through doubt, paranoia, dogma, insularity, and irony more »
2020-10-30 | The slow agonies of respiratory disease, like the swift drama of plague, can inspire great art more »
2013-04-29 | Hemingway had bullfighting, E.M. Forster had music, Colm Tóibín has opera: The anxiety-free inspiration of nonliterary art forms more »
2013-02-17 | Art and violence. Theater and film have always delighted in depictions of suffering. But how much is too much? more »
2013-12-16 | Email didn't kill the art of letter writing. It was already dead, killed by the telephone, typewriter, and telegraph more »
2010-01-01 | Damien Hirst, poor little rich boy of the art world, finds himself being hectored from all sides more »
2011-01-01 | Mussolini conceived it, Hitler commissioned it, Stalin perfected it, Saddam obsessed over the design of it: totalitarian art more »
2022-07-08 | The art of anatomy. To aid in his drawing the human form, Leonardo dissected more than 30 corpses more »
2023-04-28 | Gallery walls plastered with graphs, endless artist statements, pamphlets everywhere — behold the rise of research-based art more »
2020-12-07 | People who grouse about cultural appropriation aren't just puritanical; they don't respect the anarchic energies of art more »
2013-09-09 | The doyen of Darwinists, E.O. Wilson, has an explanation for consciousness, for art, for religion. It's remarkable. But is it convincing? more »
2013-11-21 | Eric Hobsbawm had a take on everything: Europe, America, communism, cowboys, French fashion, jazz, photography, and avant-garde art, which he loathed more »
2012-08-19 | Isaiah Berlin was charming, affable, erudite. But was his primary contribution to the art of conversation or to the field of political philosophy? more »
2012-11-24 | Want to make it as a writer in Hollywood? Understand this: Screenwriting is a craft, not an art; its values are commercial, not aesthetic more »
2012-12-11 | Marcel Duchamp was ambivalent, even embarrassed, about producing art. He was in search of a medium untainted by aesthetics. He was, in short, a Romantic more »
2014-04-25 | Art is of the world, and poets are some of the best rumor-spreaders. Why immortalize gossip in poetry? Because the results are delightful more »
2014-01-17 | We think of Émile Zola as polemicist, pamphleteer, moral beacon. But as an art critic, he helped bring about a painterly revolution. more »
2012-08-18 | Forgery at its finest. The biggest art scam in history netted millions for a German hippie and his wife. Then they lost it all more »
2013-04-17 | Vision. Truth. Taxidermy. Carl Akeley, who mastered the art of stuffing animals, could have flourished only in America, a country obsessed with realism more »
2013-06-12 | Redemption by perception. Everyday objects may not hold our interest, but ? in art as well as in life ? our ways of seeing are what shape all else... more »
2014-09-16 | A philosophy of body art. A tattoo can be many things ? testimonial, adornment, poignant reminder ? but they all share a subtext: 'Look at me? more »
2014-10-15 | Poetry has long been enlisted as a witness in dark times, a tonic for forgetfulness. But what happens when it's as much evidence as art? more »
2014-11-01 | ?Bad taste and bad art? is how Edmund Wilson dismissed H.P. Lovecraft's novels. He wasn't literary, which is what gave him such power as a writer more »
2014-11-29 | The rise of cubism. What happened in Paris in 1910 can be thanked or blamed for almost everything in art that came later that century more »
2014-12-16 | Art in an age of relentless acceleration. The novel used to be a speedy way of delivering ideas and experiences. Now it's unbearably slow more »
2010-01-01 | The art of slow reading. We need to return to a practice of stopping while we read, turning ideas over in our minds, exploring the depths of thought more »
2010-01-01 | Connoisseurship is not the only way to determine the authenticity of a painting. Works of art are handled by owners and artists. All leave fingerprints more »
2010-01-01 | 'Katie dreamed of college as a place where she''d learn why she so loved the beauties of Rembrandt. Then she took art history' more »
2016-08-26 | Unthinkable events, like the horrors of WWII, cannot be expressed in art. Does that mean such attempts are necessarily failures? more »
2015-10-22 | Dietrich and Riefenstahl: two young women from traditional German homes who led unconventional lives. Both became prisoners of their art more »
2015-10-28 | Peggy Guggenheim is known for her wealth and sex appeal. Biographers overlook the intelligence of one of the great heroines of 20th-century art more »
2015-11-03 | Heavy-handed, on the nose, show don't tell: When did we become obsessed with subtlety? In art, potency is paramount and bluntness a virtue more »
2017-04-04 | In the humanities, it’s not contemplation but speed that seems to matter now. Fast and efficient should not be how we look at art more »
2017-04-12 | The art of dream interpretation was long dominated by religious approaches. Then came the rationalists, philosophers, poets, and psychologists more »
2017-05-05 | Art is rooted in emotions. So what happens when algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Mozart, Picasso, or Shakespeare? more »
2011-01-01 | Ballet is a "conservative and insular art that resists change," says Jennifer Homans, thus linking it to beauty and nostalgia and noble ideals more »
2015-12-08 | The debonair, courtly letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark chronicle a time when art history was a path to wealth and power more »
2016-07-19 | “The art of storytelling is coming to an end,” wrote Walter Benjamin. His own humdrum attempts at fiction serve to confirm that conclusion more »
2010-01-01 | Should historic art be repatriated to its land of origin? Imagine the Renaissance without the spell of "looted" antiquities from Greece more »
2010-01-01 | 'Great works of musical art always contain elements of ambiguity. Masterpieces don''t push you around. Will the guys in white coats who study music ever get it?' more »
2010-01-01 | 'Andy Warhol wasn''t just an artist. He was, in Arthur Danto''s words, "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced"' more »
2010-01-01 | Like all great art, the Brahms Symphony No. 2 imparts to the audience a profound sense of empathy and belief, as well as a tremendous desire to urinate more »
2010-01-01 | 'Vasily Kandinsky''s aesthetic DNA lives on in the history of art right up to the present day. Peter Plagens shows how' more »
2011-01-01 | The art of biomathematics: Viruses are geometrically arranged bundles of genetic material. To attack them, change their shape. Paging Dr. Euclid more »
2011-01-01 | '"Art as Empathy," David Foster Wallace noted in the margins of a Tolstoy essay. Wallace''s archive shows he was not such an abstruse postmodernist' more »
2011-01-01 | Nabokov described art as the "dazzling combination of drab parts." Studies of his own work, however, often read like drab combinations of dazzling parts more »
2017-09-29 | We experience art in collaboration with computers. Our cultural horizon is shaped by news feeds, inboxes, and search results. What will become of critical judgment? more »
2017-12-19 | The art of conducting. While you can demonstrate stick technique, you cannot teach a budding young conductor how to cultivate a magnetic personality more »
2018-01-25 | Charles I acquired works by Caravaggio, Bruegel, and Raphael. He learned early on that a prestigious art collection was a prerequisite of dynastic power more »
2020-01-30 | Khmer Rouge, Ground Zero, melting ice caps: Tragedy began as a form of art, writes Terry Eagleton. It is now a way of life more »
2020-02-17 | Our age is full of decadent art that risks little. But safe aesthetic choices come with grave consequences for society at large more »
2020-03-12 | George Steiner, an unrepentant elitist, was a moral force for high art. Among his virtues was a hunger to be more serious more »
2020-03-19 | Lucian Freud’s art was an obsessive quest to exert maniacal control over contour, color, and light. He was a King Lear of the brush more »
2020-04-14 | We are so used to sharing art that we neglect a fundamental truth: Aesthetic experience had depths that cannot be communicated more »
2019-03-06 | A market still exists for Hitler’s watercolors, yet that dark corner of the art world is beset by a problem: rampant forgeries more »
2018-09-21 | "A dinosaur of an art form." Opera has never taken root in America. Is it simply too expensive to thrive — or even to survive? more »
2018-10-05 | A new culture war. The moralizers are young, and their quest is for representation and social justice. The result? Dull art more »
2018-02-08 | Depravity makes for bad art, but not always. It's a mistake to apply norms of social respectability to artistic expression. That way leads to moralistic kitsch more »
2018-02-23 | The history of anti-literature: Whether Plato's denouncing literary fantasy or Oscar Wilde's labeling art useless, they are unintentional tributes more »
2019-09-17 | Walter Gropius was mocked by his first wife, scorned by art critics, and pushed out of Harvard — all before Tom Wolfe’s character assassination more »
2017-06-24 | Even Bach, musical savant and master of counterpoint, did not escape critique. For one journalist, his work contained “too much art” more »
2021-12-13 | Wonder how composers manage to negotiate opera’s immense challenges? Matthew Aucoin on the “impossible art” more »
2022-01-15 | Pablo Picasso, emotional monster. His genius was rivaled by his talent for manipulation — as is evident in his art more »
2022-01-18 | Molière and the art of hypocrisy. He understood that a certain kind of dissembling is a necessary vice more »
2022-08-30 | Is it art if it makes everyone mad? Not necessarily, but in the case of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, yes more »
2021-11-20 | Salvador Dalí was a showman; René Magritte was subtler, more cunning in the way he made his life into art more »
2021-01-20 | Russian avant-garde art has been a font of fakery for decades. Some artists, celebrated in the West, may never have existed more »
2021-01-27 | Joan Didion was 70 before she finished a nonfiction book not drawn from magazine assignments. Her talent is spinning craftwork into art more »
2021-03-12 | Life is awful, or so said the cynical and perhaps nihilistic Graham Greene. But art — that could at least make life seem worthwhile more »
2021-03-31 | Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough? more »
2013-08-10 | They consult ?manvotionals,' hang out in the ?manosphere,' and wax philosophical about the art of manliness. Meet the new gender warriors more »
2013-10-11 | ?Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal,' said Oscar Wilde, who was no fan of frills and bows. He advocated for the Rational Dress Society more »
2012-08-16 | Can evolution explain the instinct to make and appreciate art? No, thought Darwin. Yes, argued Denis Dutton. Adam Kirsch sorts it out more »
2014-05-14 | What makes a work of art an icon? Maybe a historical fluke. The ?Mona Lisa? became famous when it was stolen, and popularity begets popularity more »
2012-12-04 | How did the art world become a hellhole of money-crazed pretension and 70s-era punk-rock-shock tactics? Simon Doonan has some thoughts more »
2012-12-02 | What does our vocabulary say about the state of criticism? Words like ?interesting? and ?cute? have given rise to a minor aesthetics for middling art more »
2013-01-26 | The trouble with Ai Weiwei. His art is inane and moronic, no more than political kitsch. And yet the man's courage is undeniably admirable more »
2013-01-14 | A jury of art students in 1913 convicted Matisse of ?artistic murder.' They disagreed, it seems, about what makes a canvas a painting more »
2014-10-31 | The Death of Klinghoffer is the kind of opera that incites outrage. But it is hardly agitprop. It is moving and intelligent. It is a work of art more »
2014-12-17 | Wu wei, the art of trying ? but not too hard ? is central to romance, religion, politics, and business. Those ancient Chinese philosophers were on to something more »
2014-12-17 | Modernist art repudiated kitsch, a vague substitute for real emotion. So how did we end up with Jeff Koons's balloon dogs and meta-kitsch? more »
2013-03-08 | Ours is an authenticity-obsessed age. Politicians, coffee shops, food, art are scrutinized for evidence of inauthenticity. But some things are too real to be true more »
2013-05-03 | Art of translation. After tens of thousands of pages, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have rendered Tolstoy into English. It matters more »
2013-06-11 | Algorithms are writing news stories, setting you up on dates, making (or breaking) a company's stock. But does an algorithm know what makes good art? more »
2015-02-06 | When everyone is an artist and no one buys art, artists starve. So it goes in America, where the professional dancer's annual salary can be $15,000 more »
2015-02-10 | Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Diderot, Rousseau: Esotericism ? disguising real meaning through surface contradiction ? was an art that is all but lost more »
2016-04-05 | Art in the Anthropocene. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic more »
2016-06-13 | Nina Simone was fierce, apocalyptic, "the patron saint of rebellion." That tyrannical will helped forge her art but ruined her life more »
2016-07-21 | Art asks for an emotional investment, with the promise of some insight into the human experience. But what if the artist is an algorithm? more »
2015-07-11 | The Middle Ages are derided as a time both reprehensible and ridiculous. Nonsense! Those years were not dark but alive with technology, art, curiosity, capitalism more »
2015-07-23 | In praise of boredom. Society worships multitasking, purposefulness, and returns on investment. Why bother with art or literature? Claire Messud explains more »
2016-02-23 | The academy’s relationship to art and criticism is tenuous. The university is a source of patronage, though purchased at considerable risk more »
2016-08-25 | True crimes of a Roman emperor. Was Nero a matricidal villain or the victim of a propaganda campaign? The answer may lie in art more »
2016-10-26 | Complaining has become an art form, a way of life, and, for the Tate Modern, a bizarre and misguided strategy for "community engagement" more »
2016-12-03 | For Schlegel, Tzara, and Schiller, art was by definition incomprehensible. Case in point: the Voynich Manuscript, which is quite possibly nonsense more »
2015-07-04 | The life of an artist isn't easels, turpentine, and raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles so much as struggle and poverty. Making art is work, not a privilege more »
2011-01-01 | Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze wanted to use his avant-garde art to transform the Russian Revolution. For his pains, he was murdered more »
2011-01-01 | If, as has been said, the city is "a conscious work of art," then Jane Jacobs has been its most mindful critic more »
2010-01-01 | As Twilight shows, not all that girls like is good art - or good feminism. But the backlash against Twilight should matter to feminists, even as they shudder more »
2018-11-01 | The art world is a place of cravenness and tropospheric wealth, beset by toxic rot and junkie-like behavior. Yet it can still produce good work more »
2018-06-27 | Who is Paul Theroux? A man split between art and commerce, America and Britain. A solitary nomad most at home with expats and oddballs more »
2017-09-20 | Do hallucinogenic fungi have a significant place in art history? If the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald are any guide, yes indeed more »
2017-11-15 | How do we engage with the past? Archaeology, art, coins, legal documents, living witnesses. For Thomas Carlyle, however, literary works were unsurpassable more »
2018-03-09 | The finest art, felt the Greeks, was a perfect illusion of reality. “Aphrodite of Knidos” blurred the boundary between marble and flesh more »
2019-11-23 | Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 17 times more likely than other scientists to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry more »
2020-04-04 | The art world has survived outlaw days and obscene money, keeping its culture intact. But can it survive the coronavirus? more »
2019-07-17 | What works of art define our age? The New York Times asks artists and critics an impossible question more »
2019-10-12 | Auberon Waugh and the art of writing about wine. Tasting notes include stale cardboard, French train stations, old penknives, and a dead chrysanthemum more »
2019-10-21 | Daniel Mendelsohn's critical art. His commitment to nuance and his synoptic view of a subject, whether ancient or contemporary, make him essential more »
2019-11-06 | Cave art has been found on nearly every continent. What does it mean? That our Paleolithic ancestors knew something we still strain to imagine more »
2019-06-01 | The click-swipe-and-rate economy has devastated journalism, art, literature, and entertainment. Now it's coming for the academy more »
2019-06-29 | Death of the anonymous author. If algorithms can pinpoint the identity of a writer — say, Elena Ferrante — does art as a whole lose out? more »
2023-02-23 | Most concerned with technology and the economy, does “progress studies” have room for progress in art, ethics, and culture? more »
2023-02-28 | The art of the blasphemer is based on a question: “Why do the feelings of the religious matter more than mine?” more »
2023-04-12 | It is tempting to view Bruno Schulz's art through the lens of his murder by the Nazis. But that would be a mistake more »
2023-05-17 | The culture industry has gotten very good at reflecting back our taste to us. Art is boring now because we are boring more »
2022-05-21 | Today’s artist-entrepreneurs forgo agents, gallerists, and curators to market art directly to consumers. Their medium: Instagram more »
2022-06-13 | Artists have always relied on external sources of creativity, whether drugs or devices. Is AI art so different? more »
2022-09-20 | There is a long and growing list of things people can command into existence with their phones. Why not art? more »
2022-09-30 | Catalog pages marketed as prints, print-on-demand canvas fakes, laissez-faire online marketplaces — we’re living in a golden age of art piracy more »
2022-12-23 | As an art student, Edward Hopper moved to New York at a time of dynamic new approaches. He wanted nothing to do with them more »
2022-03-28 | The movies long enjoyed a commanding cultural position as America’s central popular-art form. That era has come to an end more »
2021-08-14 | When modernist art embraced abstraction, the insane had a head start. In Germany, the status also made them a target more »
2021-01-06 | The goal of all art is inexhaustible precision — something simple, like Melville’s whale, that gains endlessly in complexity more »
2020-08-25 | Satirized, pranked, mocked — even pelted with garbage — the Victorian poet William McGonagall was famous for his terrible art more »
2020-09-25 | Though their work is rooted in the visual, most art historians are readers rather than lookers. Leo Steinberg was different more »
2020-12-03 | The art of artificial intelligence. Are we at the dawn of a new medium? If so, it would portend a doleful future more »
2021-06-14 | Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis on and off from 1951 to 1985. It shaped her art but didn't relieve her misery more »
2021-06-29 | In publishing, a generational conflict rages between the under-40s and the over-40s. At stake: the relationship between art and artist more »
2014-05-06 | The aesthetic brain. Scientists are in search of a neurological explanation for how we experience and produce art. Can neuroscience tell us anything about beauty? more »
2014-07-24 | An artist's memory is a dangerous, necessary thing. To turn experience into art, to make something out of remembering, is like ?watching ghosts in sunlight? more »
2014-08-05 | In the 1990s, young artists feared selling out. Money and art, they thought, were best kept separate. Now young artists fear that no one is buying more »
2014-08-09 | Art is a value in and of itself, not a vessel through which political or social or religious beliefs are conveyed. Why do some liberals think otherwise? more »
2013-05-13 | Eric Fischl, alpha male of New York's cocaine-fueled 80s art scene, emerged with an insight: ?Artists are whores. They go where the money is? more »
2013-06-06 | T.J. Clark calls Picasso scholarship 'second-rate celebrity literature? for those more interested in gossip than art. And he's a Picasso scholar more »
2012-08-16 | The perfect shot. Grind, temperature, pressure: Good espresso is good chemistry. It's also good art. Done well, it's pure sensory pleasure more »
2012-08-16 | A museum in Italy is setting paintings on fire. If nobody cares about the art, says the cash-strapped director, "I'll burn it" more »
2012-08-18 | Chess and art. Man Ray has designed pieces; Damien Hirst, too. The former's is sleek, the latter's lumpy. Neither rivals Marcel Duchamp's more »
2012-08-18 | The digital future is nigh. Art grows immaterial, ephemeral, impermanent. Will there be a place for sculpture, that most inconvenient of fine arts? more »
2014-10-20 | Beethoven's reputation is oversized, crushingly sublime, debilitating to all in his wake. Was he too great for the good of his art? more »
2014-11-01 | As an art critic, William Hazlitt racked up enemies. He was unsparing. But what ruined his reputation was an affair with a woman half his age more »
2014-11-20 | Rigid morality, hypersensitivity, no taste for bad taste: The art world is now among the more self-policing areas of contemporary culture more »
2010-01-01 | Fiction and other art forms make up pristine funds of data to answer vital questions about human nature. Literature is our cultural DNA more »
2010-01-01 | Art moves on, but essential qualities of decent critics do not change: knowledge, courage, and a way of finding aphorisms with good headline potential more »
2010-01-01 | Evolution may help explain copulation and even cooperation, but can it account for art and human creativity? Brian Boyd thinks it can more »
2017-03-02 | Claude Monet became synonymous with money. What sparked the 19th-century love affair between American wealth and innovative French art? more »
2017-05-16 | Encouraged by success, F. Scott Fitzgerald continued in a lofty, literary, yet Hollywood-ready mode. But the demands of art and audience rarely aligned more »
2017-05-25 | Pound and Eliot. Lish and Carver. Brod and Kafka. Fiction editors sit uncomfortably at the intersection of art and commerce. The role is ripe for recrimination more »
2010-01-01 | 'People find it easier to get pleasure from modern art than avant-garde music, and it''s not just a matter of conservatism and a love of Mozart' more »
2010-01-01 | From curator to benefactor to docent, the art museum is a natural home for women, young and old. Polly Frost provides a field guide more »
2010-01-01 | If a portrait of George Washington based on Gilbert Stuart was painted by a Chinese artist in 1800, should it be in a museum of American art? more »
2011-01-01 | New York in the 1970s was known for crime and drugs - and dance, which was for a terpsichorean moment the most vital performing art in America more »
2011-01-01 | Mark Augustus Landis is responsible for the longest, strangest art-forgery spree in American history. But did he break the law? more »
2016-05-21 | The art of suffering. In private, Edith Piaf was a practical joker. On stage, she personified deprivation, pain, loss -- and she never broke character more »
2016-06-08 | Dave Hickey writes about art but issues no judgments. He's not trying to convince you of anything. He doesn't write criticism. He writes love songs more »
2015-08-21 | The tattered tradition of summer reading: Once it was an exercise in middlebrow art, in the importance of leisure, in ambitious edification more »
2011-01-01 | 'Lynd Ward links Albrecht Dürer''s Bible pictures, made for people who couldn''t read, to Art Spiegelman''s graphic novels, created for people who could' more »
2016-10-03 | Climate affects art, especially in England: Shelley was fascinated by wind, Wordsworth by clouds, other English poets by persistent dampness. more »
2016-12-14 | Among the reasons to admire Robert Hughes: the iconoclasm of his art criticism, the pugnacity of his prose, his unabashed elitism more »
2015-05-07 | ?Who made the genius gay?? How did Tchaikovsky?s sexuality become a cause célèbre and the key to understanding his art? It isn?t. more »
2015-05-23 | Does fear of death explain the development of art, religion, language, economics, science, and almost all of human behavior? more »
2016-03-22 | By day Wallace Stevens was a casually racist insurance executive. By night he confronted the basic questions of art and life more »
2018-06-30 | Life is awash with inducements to stupidity and greed. Witness how the global art market is too busy acquiring to think about much of anything else more »
2018-09-03 | “Art, it seems to me, should simplify.” So explained Willa Cather, who, through uncompromising effort, wrote the Great American Novel more »
2019-03-26 | Tchaikovsky, futurist? Though deeply conservative in life and in art, he embraced avant-garde concepts in order to counter them more »
2019-05-29 | Peter Max’s psychedelic art always sold well. As he developed dementia, opportunists stepped in. Cue the surreal allegations and the lawsuits more »
2019-06-03 | For Adrienne Rich, the great philosopher of secrets, the wish to keep and share them goes to the heart of intimacy, and why we value art more »
2019-06-10 | The lost art of reading holy texts. We too often seek only superficial confirmation of our interpretive biases. A more deliberate approach is needed more »
2018-02-10 | Why do art collectors collect? To establish political legitimacy, to claim aristocratic roots, for tax write-offs — the reasons are as varied as the collectors more »
2019-01-18 | How do we judge abstract art? Do narratives make us more empathetic? These aesthetic riddles are suddenly the domain of experimental psychology more »
2019-03-01 | How to become the most successful art thief ever? No violence, no midnight break-ins, no dash to a getaway car more »
2017-06-23 | Orchestras of the Third Reich. Austro-German musicians’ admiration for Hitler strains any belief that high art is ennobling to the spirit more »
2017-08-09 | The birth of the modern museum allowed Victorian painters to imitate their forebears. Yet art didn’t descend into pastiche and appropriation more »
2017-09-25 | In the beginning was the pissing boy. Since then, painters and sculptors have depicted the act of urination. "A river of piss runs through art history" more »
2019-12-21 | Classical music once mattered so much it divided those who believed that art transcends politics, and those who don't more »
2020-01-09 | Harold Bloom was deranged, oracular, and arrogant. Is it even possible to create art with his musings in mind? more »
2020-01-17 | Consider hysterical critics: They point out some obvious moral lesson from art, then pivot to something more important: themselves more »
2020-02-08 | Museums are increasingly recognizing their complicity with histories of subjugation. In response, they are turning to art that shames more »
2019-09-24 | The ice caps are melting, your smart fridge is spying on you, catastrophe looms. What’s the point of art in the end times? more »
2020-05-22 | The art critic Hal Foster separated “good” from “bad” postmodernism. How real is that distinction? more »
2018-03-02 | The value of not understanding. For Grace Paley, “write what you know” was a guarantee of dullness. Art comes from exploring the unknown more »
2018-06-25 | The timeless art of suckering tourists. Armed with “authentic” engravings of Roman monuments, a 17th-century Swiss Guardsman plied his trade more »
2022-11-23 | Los Angeles’s “Immersive Van Gogh” exhibit presents a terrible question: What if an art museum were more like the airport? more »
2022-12-13 | The life of Tony Tetro, master art forger, wasn't all cocaine and fast cars. But they're part of it more »
2022-05-10 | What did Wittgenstein believe? He made an art of inscrutability. Be suspicious of anyone who claims to understand him more »
2022-05-23 | Aristotle and the art of storytelling. His views on length, structure, plot, and character hold up more than 2,000 years later more »
2022-09-15 | The history of art typically runs from one Great Male Artist to the next. What if we retold it, ignoring men altogether? more »
2022-01-31 | Cartoon images of apes, robots, and aliens are selling for millions of dollars. Is this really the future of art? more »
2021-12-25 | In 1913, Kandinsky produced a 33-page exegesis on three of his paintings. Should works of art require such explanatory aids? more »
2023-04-14 | “What ought we to do about great art made by bad men?” Engage with it, don't quash it. Judith Shulevitz explains more »
2023-05-09 | Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art more »
2021-01-28 | Art of the zinger. In the delivery of a ringing - and withering - phrase, Clive James was without parallel more »
2021-06-29 | Most widows of the Middle Ages have vanished into obscurity. But some of them shaped art history more »
2021-07-15 | A litany of recent novels skewers the art world not for its hypocrisy, venality, or elitism, but for its disturbing vacuousness more »
2021-04-17 | Dürer prepared the way for modern art in two ways: by embracing existentialism, and by maniacally self-publicizing more »
2014-04-14 | In the age of Hirst and Koons, businessmen artists and biennales thrive while museums struggle. Every era gets the art it deserves more »
2014-05-13 | So much academic art history is turgid with jargon. That's not Deborah Solomon. She's got a different problem: a prurient obsession with Norman Rockwell's sexuality more »
2014-05-30 | Nazi art? There was no master aesthetic. Culture was ad hoc, improvised. Standards were dictated by whatever Hitler felt at any given moment more »
2012-08-19 | The greatest artist of our time? It's the man who closed the gap between art and technology. It's George Lucas, or so says Camille Paglia more »
2012-12-05 | He's done 8,700 self-portraits and will soon be featured in a Paris art show. So why is Bryan Saunders living in a drug-ridden hovel more »
2013-08-01 | The best art-history course ever taught? To get in, students took a quiz. Once enrolled, they were "faculty." It didn't last more »
2013-11-27 | As the last big unregulated industry, the art world attracts pirates, rogues, eccentrics, bullies, and snobs. Ruling it all is the dealer-king more »
2012-08-16 | Imagine if art were as integral to the Olympics as sport is. Imagine medals for painting, music, literature. That's how the games used to be more »
2012-08-18 | Camille Paglia at the Met: "This is the way a museum should be." She isn't so sanguine about the contemporary art scene. Or about Stanley Fish more »
2012-08-16 | The New Yorker is often ridiculed as a bastion of upper-middle class banality. But the magazine has long been home to abrasive and subversive art more »
2012-08-17 | Hype, superficiality, ¸bercurators: Contemporary art is an easy thing to hate, says Simon Critchley. What can save it? More disgust and revulsion more »
2013-03-29 | Julian Schnabel. The name reeks of 80s hedonism and art-world narcissism. Now he's returned to painting. Time to forgive him for his sins? more »
2013-06-08 | You?ve probably never heard of Mansudae Art Studio, but you know its social-realist, grandiose North Korean aesthetic. Now available for export more »
2014-09-26 | Ever since Duchamp's "readymades," things have invaded the realm of art. But does presence alone signify aesthetic merit? Consider U2's new album more »
2014-10-09 | Stanley Milgram's experiments were not so much about proving a hypothesis as about performing a play. Poor science, but great art more »
2014-10-29 | The crime: Stealing a 299-year-old Stradivarius. The suspect: A hard-luck building manager who fancied himself a high-end art thief more »
2014-12-02 | Poetry and privilege. Poets inhabit a culture of exclusivity, driven by MFA programs and the AWP conference. What is it doing to art? more »
2013-12-07 | The art of Google Books. Tobacco stains, wormholes, dust motes, ghosts of flowers pressed between pages. And an index finger wrapped in hot pink more »
2014-01-14 | Old notions ? about art, addiction, love, truth ? are not easily cast off. But it's time to clear some detritus: What idea is ready for retirement? more »
2014-02-08 | Bernard Berenson ? connoisseur, dandy, aesthete ? lived his long life in pursuit of one goal: 'to become and be a work of art myself? more »
2014-03-07 | Here come the neurothugs, and Roger Scruton is ready for battle. Can neuroscience tell us anything meaningful about the nature and meaning of art? more »
2010-01-01 | With Eric Rohmer, as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust, art was not just about life. It was about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos more »
2017-02-22 | Somewhere at the uneasy intersection of art and science, Impressionism and empiricism, objectivity and subjectivity, sits the Rorschach test. Behold the blot more »
2015-07-16 | Damien Hirst has traded drinking, drugs, and showing off his foreskin for yoga and a return to art curation. Can he save his reputation? more »
2015-08-12 | Literature, art, music, architecture, religion, and science all have canons. What about the ingredients stirred into the tastes of our time? Why not a culinary canon? more »
2015-09-09 | Neuroaesthetics is the rage, and the possibilities are exciting. But art will always elude even the most advanced methods of cognitive science more »
2015-11-09 | Caviar, duck liver, exhibitions in Moscow, Paris, and Berlin, a woman named Lourdes. Oh, the life of Robert Hughes as art critic for Time more »
2011-01-01 | Noël Coward danced along the divide between his life and his art, knocking off songs between tea and cocktails, writing a play in three days more »
2016-05-09 | That Robert Hughes had literary chops is beyond dispute. His judgment in art is a contested matter, but it shouldn't be more »
2016-08-10 | Scott Joplin was obsessed with fashioning ragtime as high art. He failed, and his life lingers only in factoids, fragments, snapshots, and grainy recordings more »
2016-08-23 | Can art help find “the real you”? Identity is under more scrutiny than ever. Cue questions of pretension, authenticity,
coolness more »
2016-03-15 | Art and arson. Arshile Gorky, Robert Rauschenberg, Alfred Leslie, John Baldessari: Why do artists' studios so frequently go up in flames? more »
2016-03-16 | Literary translation is an imperfect art; errors and omissions flourish. Finding the original is like seeing an oil painting after the discolored varnish has been removed more »
2011-01-01 | 'Ai Weiwei''s art is seen as a menace by the Chinese government; so, in turn, the government menaces Mr. Ai. "Police beat me, I nearly died"' more »
2011-01-01 | Stealing Rembrandts. Only Picasso has been more frequently pilfered. But art theft is pointless theft: What can you do with a heisted painting? more »
2011-01-01 | 'As if her husband''s drinking and philandering weren''t enough, Lee Krasner''s art never could escape his paint-splattered shadow' more »
2011-01-01 | 'John Cage''s music sounds like an argument between form and chaos. His curiosity bled into his art. "I''m interested in going to extremes"' more »
2019-08-07 | H. G. Wells, diviner of the future. The art of prediction is difficult, he determined, and thus warrants an academic solution: “Professors of Foresight” more »
2018-03-09 | In praise of profanity. Swearing helps us manages stress and build trust. In fact, with proper tone and timing, it’s an art more »
2018-06-02 | Goldman Sachs has been depicted as the central villain of the Great Recession. Yet little has been said about its most egregious sin: the lobby art more »
2017-12-05 | People make music, dance, paint, tell stories, adorn objects and themselves. The creative impulse is universal. Why? E.O. Wilson on the invention of art more »
2018-01-13 | Art and the Awokening. As politics and pop culture converge, we must distinguish between what's engineered to flatter contemporary taste and what says something new more »
2019-04-24 | We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. And yet with cave art, burial complexes, and melting glaciers, these impenetrable strata draw us still more »
2019-05-30 | Art in an age of self-exposure. Gone is the withholding of secrets — novelists now put self-consciousness front and center more »
2019-07-06 | Step aside, Pollock and de Kooning. Deep-pocketed buyers are losing interest in abstract art. What do they crave? SpongeBob SquarePants with Xs on his eyes more »
2019-12-30 | From Spotify to Netflix, we consume culture that has been algorithmically shaped to our taste. But art is most potent when unexpected more »
2018-08-15 | Kant believed that beautiful art “must always show a certain dignity in itself.” Alfred Brendel disagrees. He believes in musical jokes more »
2018-09-28 | So-called “Instagram museums” claim to reinvent art. But visiting them feels like a masochistic march through an existential void more »
2018-09-29 | In 1924, Paul Jordan-Smith founded a one-man art movement: Disumbrationism. It was an elaborate hoax — or was it? more »
2018-10-18 | Cy Twombly fell for Robert Rauschenberg, an Italian heiress, and, reportedly, his own assistant. His art, like his love life, was inscrutable more »
2018-12-07 | The invention of the telescope sparked a revolution in art. For Milton, who visited Galileo, seeing the cosmos was a visit from the Muse more »
2019-03-13 | Street art used to be about anti-establishment activism, punk rock, and community spirit. Now it's the handmaid of consumerism more »
2017-06-15 | Inside Wagner's head. The composer's essence was self-dramatization wrapped in contradiction. He was, himself, an all-embracing work of art more »
2017-06-22 | Float nude in saltwater, pee in a gold toilet, lounge in a field of phalluses. Participatory art preys on our narcissism. Is that a bad thing? more »
2017-07-07 | Is it a form of cultural appropriation to take another’s sorrow as the source of your art? Zadie Smith ponders the question more »
2017-08-08 | “There are no facts, only art,” wrote David Shields in 2010. It's a prescient description of our myopic and self-absorbed journalistic era more »
2020-05-19 | “What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” Virginia Woolf’s question has always been thorny for women more »
2022-05-20 | Jhumpa Lahiri: “Once art weds itself to a social or political purpose it is bled of its true purpose” more »
2022-06-22 | The art monster resists the petty pull of the domestic for the snarling single-mindedness of creativity. But it’s not always that simple more »
2022-07-12 | In order to create a Führermuseum, the Nazis embarked on the greatest looting of art in European history more »
2021-08-18 | Building an art collection is akin to building an identity. What happens when that collection is looted? more »
2021-11-26 | Jasper Johns was an art-historical fixture at the age of 35. No wonder he entered his late style prematurely more »
2021-12-27 | "If art ... performs any form of moral service, it does so by alerting us to the difficulties of being moral" more »
2022-01-13 | An emphasis on “relevance” in art is troubling Jed Perl. Where does the threat come from? He won’t say more »
2022-02-15 | “I’ve become cannon fodder in a culture war.” Art Spiegelman contemplates a battle in schools over Maus more »
2022-03-05 | Fights over Ulysses are fights about snootiness, entitlement, and the canon. They are fights over the role of art in society today more »
2022-03-12 | We celebrate the invention of writing for the art and creativity that followed. The origin story, however, is more humdrum more »
2021-01-08 | Sylvia Plath is more than the way she died and the man she married. Her art transcends tragedy more »
2021-01-18 | In the late '90s, a professor began talking with Bruno Lohse, art agent to Hermann Göring. Then things got complicated more »
2020-10-06 | Caravaggio’s Baroque art exploded against the orderliness of the Renaissance, pulling viewers into “some cosmic soup of slow knowing" more »
2021-04-10 | Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists more »
2021-05-15 | For Adrienne Rich, the gap between life and art was fraught. She was too narrow or too wide, too personal or too political more »
2021-05-29 | Because the art world is loath to fully censor harmful works, a new tactic has emerged: “curatorial activism” more »
2021-07-23 | Moby Dick, the shark from Jaws, Stephen King's Cujo - animals perpetrate plenty of violence in art. Violence against animals, however? That's taboo more »
2012-08-18 | Forget "beautiful" or "elegant," "painterly" or "sublime." We now talk about art as "interesting" or "cute," even "zany." What do those things mean? more »
2012-08-16 | The banality of money. Pity the novelist who writes about the rich. Demonizing Wall Street might be good politics, but it's usually bad art more »
2012-08-16 | The Brothers Grimm, 18th-century terrorists, savored violence in their art. Toes are chopped off, severed fingers fly through the air. The fairy tales validate our own fears more »
2013-04-02 | The genius of Jill Lepore. She's turned microhistory into an essayistic art. But therein lurk the perils of the quest for perfect readability more »
2013-07-16 | Biography distracts from art. Let us remember Schubert (?creator of an all-embracing world?) and Liszt (?romantic sovereign of the piano?) for their work more »
2012-11-23 | Warholism - the belief that popular culture trumps all others ? is the dominant ism of the art world. We?re all worse off for it more »
2012-11-24 | Becoming a brand name, Damien Hirst says, ?is an important part of life.' But his brand has cratered. He broke the rules of the art market more »
2013-02-18 | In search of timeless art. Hear a song over and over again: the magic fades, the melody grates. What if you discovered an immortal song, painting, poem, novel? more »
2015-01-28 | Shock is no longer chic. We?re right to be weary, but we?ve become too weary. Is offensive art still possible? more »
2015-02-13 | Art and the Third Reich. Why did artists cooperate with the regime? Their motivation came down to ? what else? ? self-interest and ego more »
2013-08-17 | A stuffed squirrel, covered in sequins. Outsider art has long been the work of self-taught amateurs. Now the outsiders have moved inside more »
2013-09-28 | The art world sneered at Norman Rockwell, a nervous man who led a sad life. Corny or not, his folksiness endures more »
2013-09-30 | Death and literature. Great art is suffused with a sense of the transitory, the perishable, the mortal. Narrative is an attempt to delay the inevitable more »
2014-05-20 | Duke Ellington may have lacked the technical brilliance of a Fats Waller or Art Tatum; his solos could be flat. But he was unrivaled as a bandleader more »
2014-05-22 | In the wonder provoked by art, the interaction ?between mind and the world is brought into focus,' says Jesse Prinz. It's a wonder rooted in nurture, not nature more »
2014-07-08 | Art history: Is the discipline the result of a childhood swap between two brothers? The strange saga of the banker and the bibliomaniac more »
2014-07-26 | What do we want when confronting great art? Solitude, contemplation, silence ? all of which are inhibited, even prohibited, in most museums more »
2013-12-27 | Art's value is not that it can astonish us with technical proficiency. The ultimate worth of art is therapeutic. It shapes our experience of life more »
2014-01-24 | Expelled from one art school and the prime suspect in the arson of another, Lucian Freud had a gift for belligerence. But he just kept on painting more »
2014-03-21 | What's sacred about sacred art? For some, it expresses the divine. For others, it conveys the essence of humanity, as in gazing upon a Rothko more »
2014-09-02 | Jeff Koons is an entrepreneur, not an artist. A Wall Street guy who forever changed the art world. His formula for success: size + garishness = big money more »
2014-09-16 | The new chasm is not between science and art but between those who speak the language of money and those who don't. John Lanchester explains more »
2014-11-15 | The narrowing of history. Ever more scholars shed light on an ever more obscure past. When did historiography become an esoteric art? more »
2014-12-30 | Careers in art are being shaped by two trends: The death of the artist as solitary genius, and the rise of the artist as entrepreneur more »
2010-01-01 | Few developments central to the history of art have been so misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus more »
2010-01-01 | Reality TV has not only helped to debase the networks, it has even trashed the time-honored art of bad acting. James Wolcott explains more »
2016-05-25 | Cultural critics and English professors face the same problem: How to articulate a positive case for art and literature, and talk as if they actually matter more »
2016-07-04 | We are only now coming to terms with what happens to the idea of art when images can be endlessly circulated, reproduced, and manipulated more »
2011-01-01 | Science vs. art. "The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities has no substance," says Jonathan Gottschall. "We can walk right through it" more »
2015-09-24 | Not warmth or decency, but ornament. We dress ourselves out of vanity — but fashion is pivotal to art, ideas, even history itself more »
2015-11-18 | Sir George Scharf was a Victorian art curator who lived with his mother and had bad digestion. Is he the most boring man in history? more »
2015-12-03 | The wholesale discrediting of Victorian art lasted from the 1910s into the 1960s. Its rehabilitation is a great and understudied phenomenon more »
2016-11-22 | To grow up in the Soviet Union was to celebrate suffering. It “justifies our hard and bitter life. For us, pain is an art” more »
2016-11-24 | Rauschenberg’s studio cost $10 a month and lacked water and heat. Just the place, perhaps, for radically altering our ideas about art more »
2016-02-09 | Authenticity and art. When it’s possible to create visually perfect reproductions of famous works, will we discard the originals, or celebrate them anew? more »
2016-05-05 | Sincerity and irony in art. What can beatniks, punks, and hipsters teach us about commitment, both aesthetic and political? more »
2017-12-02 | Giraffomania. The first giraffe in France arrived in 1826 and caused a sensation. Everything, even art, was “la mode à la girafe” more »
2018-02-16 | A robot Rembrandt? Artificial intelligence cannot yet make fine art. When it can, the results will be both painfully boring and beyond our wildest imagination more »
2020-03-19 | Inigo Philbrick is the art world’s mini-Madoff. A young and charming dealer who dabbled in drugs, prostitution, and endless scams more »
2020-04-01 | Whoever has the most galleries when he dies, wins. Such is the consensus among art collectors like the particularly ruthless Larry Gagosian more »
2019-08-26 | We are moving into a “soulless future” as art, literature, and religion recede from the public square — or so frets Camille Paglia? more »
2019-02-09 | Instagram-friendly, immersive art spaces promise to transport to your happy place. But beyond the confetti dome is a bleak, desperate reality more »
2019-02-18 | What is neuroscience doing to art -- explaining away its mystery or, as Eric Kandel would have it, aiding our sense of art's wonder? more »
2018-08-17 | Weegee specialized in photographing crime scenes. Murder was his business, he said. Art critics loved his style. Then he slipped into obscurity more »
2018-10-09 | To be called a plagiarist is arguably the most existential accusation a writer can face. But perhaps borrowing is simply part of art more »
2018-11-08 | Art, before the age of mechanical reproduction. The four extant original manuscripts of Old English poetry are a reminder of the yawning void of history more »
2018-03-15 | Alain Locke, dean of the Harlem Renaissance, believed in the “ethics of beauty itself.” But the creation of art, he knew, has political consequences more »
2018-05-25 | A work of art can be incisive, beautiful, discomfiting, or representative, but not necessary. So why do critics keep using that word? more »
2018-06-28 | How should a novelist be? Don't read about yourself — not reviews, think pieces, stories, or tweets. Jonathan Franzen contemplates life, art, and bushtits more »
2019-04-16 | How does a $1,000 work of dubious origin become a $450-million masterpiece? A tale of greed and the dark arts of art speculation more »
2019-05-30 | To Oscar Wilde, there was no such thing as a moral or immoral piece of art. Why has this view fallen out of favor with critics? more »
2017-08-14 | Art enriches life and helps engage us with mortality. And so Robert McCrum, after a stroke and a fall, began to catalog his inventory of dissolution more »
2017-09-15 | NASA’s leaders had an early revelation: Discovery means little if the public can't see it. The agency has commissioned outer-space art ever since more »
2020-08-06 | The socially distant art gallery: "A space of relaxation, leisure and education has become one of intense moral precarity" more »
2022-10-26 | Stephen Elliot made a name for himself by turning self-destruction into art. Is his "shitty media men" lawsuit any different? more »
2022-12-01 | In the work of T.J. Clark, art history matches the philosophical ambition of artists like Cézanne, Pissarro, and Matisse more »
2022-12-03 | Art can’t solve our problem or make up for our losses. But it might help us transcend them. Griffin Oleynick explains more »
2022-09-08 | How radical is radical art? After all, today’s avant-garde can always congeal into tomorrow’s orthodoxy more »
2022-01-11 | Surrealism is no longer the art world’s reigning movement. But it’s uniquely suited to making us slow down and look more »
2022-03-10 | The new science of art. What can we learn from digitizing, coding, and running algorithms on databases of paintings? more »
2022-04-04 | What's remarkable about Picasso's art in the 1930s and '40s is the relatively scant imprint of world events more »
2022-04-26 | Against relevance. It doesn’t explain the mysterious relationship between an individual and the art that moves them more »
2021-09-20 | In an era obsessed with the political responsibility of the artist, remember what’s lost when art is used for politics. Remember Thomas Mann more »
2021-09-24 | Both Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama were discouraged from making art. Both attempted suicide. Both faced their demons by making phalluses more »
2023-03-17 | “The history of art is the history of the underrated and overlooked, as well as the overblown and over-sold” more »
2023-04-06 | In 1996, Adam Gopnik shocked the art world by delimiting the scope of Picasso’s genius. His critique has won the day more »
2023-05-10 | “They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.” What to do about the art of monstrous people? more »
2021-01-09 | What to do with Nazi art? Hundreds of works, collecting dust in an Army fort in Virginia, may stay there forever more »
2020-10-19 | What do we mean when we say a piece of art is "relevant"? The characterization says less about the work than about the audience more »
2021-07-03 | A matter of taste. All responses to art are fundamentally personal, but not all are equally valid more »
2021-08-06 | The American art world has a new summer home: Aspen. The accompanying wealth and racial disparities are cringe-worthy more »
2021-05-05 | As recently as 50 years go, photography was a marginal creative form. Then it transformed the art world more »
2014-01-27 | Harold Rosenberg was perhaps first, and not last, to complain about artists getting degrees. But the M.F.A. is not what ails art. No, the problem is the hubris of artists more »
2014-04-08 | The New Review: Cover art by Roy Lichtenstein, fiction by Ian McEwan, essays by Isaiah Berlin, Philip Larkin, A.J.P. Taylor, Clive James. Best literary magazine of the past 50 years? more »
2012-08-16 | You don't easily give up Saul Bellow to death. His novels were obsessed with big questions. But he didn't impose his ideas. "No amount of assertion will make an ounce of art" more »
2010-01-01 | How did the study of literature as an art come to be replaced by the mix of bad philosophy and worse prose academics call Theory? Where is Borges when you need him? more »
2016-10-31 | "From a very early age, I had this sense of harshness and the need for endurance.” John Berger at 90, still arguing about how to see art -- and the world more »
2016-12-27 | His previous novel said too much. "The true work of art is the one that says the least," he now believed; silence invites readers to imagine depth. How Camus wrote The Stranger more »
2015-08-15 | Sex, brawls, and litigation. Gore Vidal made intellectual sparring into an art form. His mantra: “Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television.” more »
2015-08-28 | It's been said that the novelist is the historian of the present and the historian the novelist of the past. Consider how Edward Gibbon aligned scholarship with art more »
2017-04-07 | The market value and reputation of the art world's enfant terrible Damien Hirst have sunk. A new work, involving a shipwreck, will try to raise them more »
2015-05-18 | Kim Kardashian is the unlikely embodiment of Duchamp’s urinal. “In declaring herself, against all common sense, as art, she mocks and dares and provokes” more »
2015-06-18 | “I’m after me,” explained Edward Hopper. He hoped to find himself in what he painted, which explains the mystery of his art more »
2019-12-05 | John Berger’s 1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing, was a grenade lobbed at art history. But, as he learned, it’s not easy to follow an act of demolition more »
2018-06-30 | Frida Kahlo’s ashtray, her eyebrow pencil, her prosthetic leg — they convey only emptiness, alienation, and loss. They are displayed in museums, but they are not art more »
2018-02-28 | October 18, 1973: Sotheby's auctioned works by Twombley, Johns, and Rauschenberg. It was called the day the art world collapsed. Well, no, but it was the beginning of the end more »
2018-05-23 | “Performance art” once involved raucous Dadaists; now it’s a Lady Gaga performance or Kanye West tweet. Why have pop stars started dealing in high-concept abstractions? more »
2020-04-25 | “Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.” So holds Gerhard Richter, the art world’s great poet of uncertainty more »
2023-03-23 | What is the proper relationship between art and morality? One answer lies in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, a filthy book about an intolerable man more »
2021-09-20 | The Dickens style. Trollope called it “jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules.” But rule-breaking was essential to Dickens’s art more »
2020-12-17 | Beethoven and freedom. "We may judge what is merely beautiful, but sublime art judges us, or better said, it challenges us to judge ourselves” more »
2020-10-27 | A new biography of Lucian Freud withholds gossip into “private affairs.” That’s a shame — Freud’s private affairs propelled his art more »
2012-08-16 | For Edvard Munch, art was an act of memory, a revisiting of images and ideas, a blurring of the line between original and copy. "I don't paint what I see - but what I saw" more »
2014-05-08 | Mozart never finished his Requiem, nor Schubert his Unfinished Symphony. Bach didn't live to complete his Art of Fugue. But what of composers who intentionally make music feel unfinished?. more »
2014-07-14 | Jules Verne was a master, but of what? His books are not high art, his prose rarely more than serviceable. What he does offer is ancient wisdom and modern know-how more »
2010-01-01 | 'Andy Warhol''s 200 One Dollar Bills goes up in price by tens of millions, while 200 actual one dollars bills become more worthless. James Panero on mysteries of the art market' more »
2017-02-24 | Cézanne, who grew up in a mountainous region, was a master of line. Turner, from London, was expert in mist and fog. Does geology dictate art? more »
2017-03-09 | Of ice and art. From Burke’s sublime to Freud’s unconscious to Hemingway’s theory of artistic ingenuity, the iceberg has come to represent the creative process. Why? more »
2016-09-03 | Philip K. Dick made skepticism an art form. His inability to separate reality from fiction, and his certainty that everyone was out to get him, was the wellspring of his work more »
2016-09-08 | William Empson had nothing more than a serious amateur's interest in Eastern art, but this was a man undeterred by lack of expertise. Thus The Face of the Buddha more »
2016-11-07 | For all his refined taste and passion for art, Kenneth Clark was emotionally stunted. Adulation made him feel like a fraud. "My feelings are as stiff as an unused limb” more »
2016-11-08 | Fabric fails to impress. We shrug at a state-of-the-art raincoat, dress shirt, or pair of tights. But no technology is as powerful as fabric. Virginia Postrel explains more »
2016-11-16 | Female artists have long been pegged as personal — which is to say, their art is not universal. "Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss" more »
2016-12-05 | The museum of the past was one of objects, focused on its permanent collection. The museum of the future is a cafe with "art on the side" more »
2018-10-13 | Kandinsky has long been seen as the father of abstract painting. But Hilma af Klint predated him. Her art was informed by seances — what the spirits said, she did more »
2018-06-20 | Murders over a Mexican stele, a “Modigliani” unceremoniously tossed around, frequent calls from the FBI. Life is not dull for James Martin, the world’s top art detective more »
2018-08-16 | The years leading up to World War I were a time of radical artistic experimentation — vorticism, cubism, futurism, "anti-art." These new movements turned out to be further casualties of the war more »
2017-10-02 | Bruce Chatwin was many things — traveler, art expert, connoisseur of the extraordinary. But not someone who favored intimate revelation. “I don’t believe in becoming clean" more »
2017-12-18 | It does not take long to sense something false in Andrew Wyeth. His art was his artifice, and his compelling images carry the stamp of inauthenticity. James Panero explains more »
2018-03-23 | Communing with art won’t make you money, burn calories, or help you network. It may, writes Claire Messud, help you find joy in the superfluous and glory in each day more »
2020-01-22 | "Robert Lowell’s poems are at their most unsettling when they disclose his own moral recklessness, offering only themselves — the fact of art — as recompense" more »
2020-07-02 | There’s no reason that the art gallery as we know it, a 19th-century invention, should last forever. Does it have a post-pandemic future? more »
2017-06-06 | The Dreyfus affair gave us the word “intellectual.” It also redefined truth, justice, and art. Look at the impact on Proust, Joyce, Kafka more »
2017-07-27 | If these are the end times of civilization — ecological collapse, social and political unraveling — it's worth asking: What sort of art comes out of such a dire reckoning? more »
2019-03-19 | Hilma af Klint has been lauded as the inventor of abstract art. But she didn’t think of her work as abstract, and her visual approach was centuries old more »
2022-09-24 | “Owning a disputed, possibly wildly valuable, art work is a cruel test of any person’s aesthetic values, basic reason, and innate (often well-disguised) capacity for greed” more »
2022-03-26 | “Isn’t the art scene today revolting?” Andy Warhol asked Cecil Beaton. “I wish I could find a way of making it worse.” He did more »
2012-12-05 | One hundred years ago, the leading lights of modernism broke ranks with the arbiters of culture. "No single event, before or since, has had such an influence on American art" more »
2010-01-01 | 'Who owns art stolen in war? To return plunder to its owners may seem easy, but in practice it''s very hard, especially for objects seized in the distant past' more »
2014-11-18 | It's OK to say, 'I?m working on a novel?; it's inadvisable to say, 'I?m working on my novel.' The distinction interesting, but is it an art project? more »
2016-05-04 | The value of simplicity and complexity in art is a matter of taste. In science, the search for simple theories is a requirement. But is simpler better? more »
2016-06-13 | Diane Arbus was depressed. She was in an incestuous relationship with her brother. She was a mess. But that had nothing to do with her art more »
2016-06-24 | Obsessions with Truth and Beauty get in the way of art. Poetry isn’t just about Shakespeare in the park and seminars on modernism — it’s about politics more »
2011-01-01 | After the shock is gone. Pity the poor artist, heir to Marcel Duchamp, trying to advance a career by attracting attention from the jaded art world audience of today more »
2016-12-28 | Sensory overload. After 500 years, Bosch’s demonic art continues to confound. How to understand an oeuvre that took one observer a year to absorb? more »
2015-06-02 | Dave Hickey has a gift for unfashionable subjects, like Las Vegas and Liberace. An art critic of sorts, he’s also one of our best writers more »
2015-06-08 | The dream of a common language goes back to Genesis. But it remains just that, a dream. Still unresolved: Is translation an art or a problem of math? more »
2015-06-13 | Educated people used to know the difference between French Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. No more. We no longer care about fine art more »
2015-06-17 | The sad fate of the silent-film star. Buster Keaton’s art was sublime. Then came talkies, alcoholism, and drifting around Hollywood in a “land yacht” more »
2018-07-28 | If art can do harm -- and it can -- it can also do good. If it’s beautiful enough or moving enough or original enough, maybe it can even atone for the sins of the artist more »
2018-08-01 | In defense of ugly art. From da Vinci’s “series of disgusts” to such works as “A Grotesque Old Woman,” viewers tend to gawk at the hideous. They should look deeper more »
2019-07-15 | Arson, self-mutilation, vandalism, perhaps even terrorism — Pyotr Pavlensky’s guerrilla art has landed him in jail. If that won’t stop him, what will? more »
2017-10-20 | "The fate of artists and of art itself is in the hands of too few persons, who share kindred tastes and cultish dogma," says Jonathan Meades. It is a cult of "puritanical, po-faced, censorious nothingness" more »
2019-01-21 | Gary Indiana was for a few years art critic at The Village Voice. He couldn't have cared less about those columns. That others did was a source of irritation more »
2019-02-11 | Andy Warhol emerged from the commercial ooze, confining himself largely to the surface of life. Yet his gifts were substantial, especially his ability to make synthetic, mechanized art feel authentic more »
2020-02-25 | Dave Hickey, at 80, is a broken-down lion of a man. What remains is a vision of art that extends to every realm of human endeavor more »
2019-10-01 | Was one ménage à trois (featuring a famous mezzo-soprano, her art-dealer husband, and Ivan Turgenev) at the heart of Europe’s cultural boom? more »
2019-10-12 | The competing visions for modernism included “Make it new,” of course, but also: “Art is dead,” “Realism = Abstraction,” and “victory over the sun” more »
2019-12-02 | John Simon and the art of the brutal pan. "When he saw something he hated, he eviscerated it and ate its liver, and those meals were not infrequent" more »
2022-08-04 | Why did Susan Sontag become, of all things, a critic? Because art was an escape from life. Or maybe because she met a man at a party more »
2021-05-06 | Why does a piece of art endure? Is it the quality of the work that matters most, or the artist’s skill at self-promotion and provocation? more »
2013-01-08 | For love of women and art. Was Raphael a chaste saint who sublimated his passion into his work? Or was he a womanizer who died in the arms of his mistress? more »
2010-01-01 | Why is so much contemporary art so awful? Weâ??re in the death throes of modernism, says Ben Lewis. It isnâ?'t the first time artistic greatness has collapsed into decadence more »
2015-06-16 | The challenges of translating Homer. How does one render magically appearing bathtubs or spears in two places at once? That depends. Is The Iliad art or accident? more »
2016-09-01 | To grasp a society's deepest tensions, look to its big, popular art form. In the West, it used to be the novel. In India now, it's Bollywood more »
2016-10-06 | Beyond self-evident. In a time of Lockean philosophy and trompe-l’oeil art, America’s founders embraced doubt and ambiguity. Was their stance a weakness? more »
2016-11-15 | Bob Dylan was described by one scholar as “the greatest living user of the English language.” But how far do words go in encapsulating his art? more »
2015-07-25 | American road-tripping has left its mark on literature: Roughing It, On the Road, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here are the routes that matter more »
2016-07-11 | 11 Picassos, six van Goghs, five Cézannes and a rare pair of Monets. That's what's at stake in a family art feud. “It’s Agatha Christie meets Homer” more »
2016-08-22 | “Free at last, with no money troubles, and able to love, to sing, and to die,” Paul Gauguin wrote about Polynesia, as a member of the "exote school of art" more »
2015-12-23 | Ted Hughes believed that poetry originates from injury: The deeper the wound, the better the art. Yet some of his best poetry predates his worst wounds more »
2015-12-28 | Much used — and abused — but little understood, realpolitik is about not only the art of the possible but also the messiness of politics more »
2015-12-31 | The oldest art. Storytelling brings us together and helps us make sense of the world. It’s also primed for deception — and con artists have taken note more »
2016-04-05 | The “taint” of commerce. When art becomes a stand-in for wealth and political influence, where does that leave those who collect for sake of collecting? more »
2010-01-01 | 'Even if the beauties of a peacock''s tail, the Art of Fugue, and a stunning landscape have deep Darwinian roots, the pleasures they give us are quite different' more »
2017-10-20 | “O Niebuhr, Where Art Thou?” He died along with the literate public's interest in theology. Now Christian thought is in a long retreat. It doesn’t have to be that way more »
2020-04-18 | In the years after his death, Andy Warhol’s art was seen skeptically. Now the cultural fog has cleared, and we can see him for what he was: an American Picasso more »
2018-09-15 | When we are young, we are taught that art comes from lofty places — the pursuit of truth, beauty, sublimity. Nonsense. It comes from antipathy, insecurity, jealousy more »
2019-01-05 | Few spaces in American life today are exempt from the gentle but irksome dictates of mindfulness. Now the wellness-industrial complex has entrenched itself in the halls of art museums more »
2019-02-04 | An adjunct professor of art tries to make rent. The result: a Thoreauvian quest for radical simplicity — and the birth of America’s tiny-house movement more »
2019-02-26 | Jordan Peterson’s collection of Soviet-era artworks, comprising more than 300 pieces, has taught him something: "Nothing is powerful enough to stand in the way of art" more »
2019-03-04 | Talk of translating literature is often esoteric; invariably it's described as an “art.” Unreliability is built into each step of the process. As is anxiety more »
2019-03-05 | Art forces us to consider the experience of others — but it that a good thing? For Paul Bloom, empathy is selfish and shortsighted. For Knausgaard, it's banal more »
2020-05-11 | “Thou art a boil / A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle.” Shakespeare didn’t write much about the bubonic plague, but it did provide good insult material more »
2022-07-29 | Sheila Heti is a crusader for art in an era of political moralism. Why is that plain truth so hard for her critics to see? more »
2022-08-26 | In the disaffected New York art world, a large part of a publicist’s job is getting people to show up to parties. Enter Kaitlin Phillips more »
2020-11-21 | Rose Dugdale was a 33-year-old British heiress with a Ph.D. and a glowing recommendation from Iris Murdoch. How did she end up an art thief? more »
2013-06-19 | The evolutionary origins of art. To believe in a biology of aesthetic experience ? that we are predisposed to particular images and rhyme schemes ? is tempting. But is it true? more »
2010-01-01 | 'Might Flannery O''Connor''s Catholic faith cause the brilliance of her art to fade in an age of militant secularism? Seems not, as her reputation continues to grow' more »
2010-01-01 | Avatar exceeds the normal bounds of its art in an attempt to reach for the better, higher, newer - in fact, it tries to validate the director as kind of superhero more »
2010-01-01 | 'Velázquez''s Las Meninas is shown in a Prado gallery that often teems with people. This great work of art was painted, however, for an audience of one' more »
2017-02-01 | A sense of modesty was central to Elizabeth Bishop's art. She published only about 100 poems during her life. "I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it” more »
2017-04-28 | In 1973, Jerry Saltz was 22, full of himself and making art obsessively. He battled self-doubt and lost. But he learned how to be a critic more »
2017-06-05 | Film as an art form is routinely dismissed in comparison to books. The attitude is so taken for granted that people assume even Martin Scorsese subscribes to it. He doesn't more »
2016-07-02 | The average English film subtitle is a bar of thin sans-serif text of around 40 characters. A model of economy, it's an art form worthy of critical scrutiny more »
2016-08-19 | Is there perfection in art? Sam Anderson conducts an aesthetic investigation in Florence, home of Michelangelo’s “David" and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot more »
2016-10-07 | The art and artifice of the poetic pilgrimage. Can seeing Shakespeare’s First Folio or Dickinson’s house in Amherst bring a reader closer to the work itself? more »
2015-06-05 | Half Xanadu, half Lowe’s, the Robert Rauschenberg archive contains bicycles, neckties, a recipe for key lime pie. How to separate the materials of life from those of art? more »
2016-04-16 | Inspired by Nietzsche, the architect Philip Johnson went to Berlin to understand both art and power. There he marveled at blond boys in black leather paying homage to Hitler more »
2018-01-15 | What to do with the works of artists whose conduct has been abhorrent? If a work of art speaks, it does so in a way that transcends the limitations and imperfections of the artist more »
2019-10-01 | “The art of rest,” “how to do nothing,” “digital minimalism” — new self-help books abandon productivity tips for a celebration of solitude more »
2018-12-05 | Art is a way of contending with life, even in its shadiest corners. But does that cover artists like Egon Schiele, who displayed interest in prepubescent girls? more »
2019-01-14 | His works are not Gothic; they are not parody or satire; they are funny but not jokey. It's weird how Edward Gorey's art is ubiquitous but hard to characterize more »
2019-03-27 | "Art can’t save you," says Christian Wiman. "It can give you glimpses of something beautiful, maybe even something redemptive, but there’s nothing there to hold onto" more »
2018-03-07 | The male glance is the opposite of the male gaze. Rather than linger lovingly on women, it looks, assumes, and moves on. It is ruining our ability to see good art more »
2018-03-22 | Science is thought to be cold and clinical, art warm and encouraging of wonder. The drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal reveal that divide for what it is: nonsense more »
2017-10-12 | E. O. Wilson suggests that evolution can “make sense” of art. But the relationship between biology and creativity is more complicated — and less determinative — than that more »
2015-06-04 | What’s a museum for? In the hands of Renzo Piano, it is a place to gawk at the New York skyline, to eat, to see and be seen, to do most everything – except see art more »
2016-03-24 | They gather each morning at 8:30 in a converted warehouse in Long Island City. What brings them together is a shared belief that the 20th century ruined art more »
2017-09-29 | To see “how difference operates inside people’s heads,” said Stuart Hall, “you have to go to art, you have to go to culture — to where people imagine, where they fantasize, where they symbolize” more »
2019-10-15 | Harold Bloom, “a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer,” has died. He was 89... James Wood... Graeme Wood... Michael Dirda... Justin A. Sider... Dwight Garner... James Romm... Marco Roth... Lucas Zwirner... David Lehman... Gary Saul Morson... Stanley Fish... Guardian... AP
more »