Whether destroying the Mona Lisa or whole museums, why does contemporary film and TV want us to watch the art world burn?
Tag: Art
Escape from Earth: Raquel Forner’s Space Paintings
If the iconic NASA astronaut is a confident (male) neo-colonist, Forner’s Astronauts are infantile, unprotected, vulnerable.
Literature: What to Make of Complicity?
Turkish literature shows how difficult it is to balance political critique with literary experimentation. But it can—and, perhaps, must—succeed.
It’s on the Illabus: Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings
“Everything in the comic has to be thought about from front cover to end … How are you going to use all the secret resources of comics?”
“We Plot to Undo the World”
Artist Simone Leigh curated a series of intellectual sermons directed by Black women who grieved, strategized, loved, and yearned for community.
The Art We Do Together: “Art Worlds” 40th Anniversary
Howard Becker pointed out that critics, curators, suppliers, and administrators are as important to the creation of art as artists themselves.
Gordon Syron and the Art of the Invasion
In what ways might art resist a colonial state? Can a painting function as a land rights claim?
The Art of Intelligence
Art made by AI subverts our usual understandings of creativity as a uniquely human power.
Lauren Redniss on the Art of Dance
“The discipline and certain ideas from dance have stuck with me and inform more or less everything I’ve done ever since.”
Unreal Realism: Chicago’s Avant-Garde Women
Chicago—for women artists of various backgrounds—demanded a new art to advance the struggle for freedom by imagining other possible worlds.
Do the Humanities Need Experts or Skeptics?
Why are Anglophone novels more worthy of attention than Ottoman shadow puppetry or the art of knot-tying? Just what are the humanities for?
Freedom’s Stakes
Postwar culture was divided between “freedom” and “totalitarianism.” Or was it?
Quilting: An Archive of Hand, Eye, and Soul
Once, Black women employed textile arts both as a mutual aid network, and as a safe space to envision a Southern Black liberated life.
Build Culture, Build Community, Break Fascism
On both sides of the border, artivistas—art activists—infuse their creative and political work with minority struggle and solidarity.
You Are Never Alone at the Museum
What do we see when looking at art from the perspective of the infrastructures that sustain it?
A Beacon of Futurity and a Balm of Security
Guadalupe Maravilla makes multimedia art to grapple with his “traumatic experiences” as a unaccompanied child and undocumented migrant.
Museums as Monuments to White Supremacy
Millions of items looted from Africa during the colonial era remain housed in private collections and museums around the world.
Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
Paris Doesn’t Always Have To Be Burning
The documentary "Paris Is Burning" obscured the ordinary lives of queer people of color, but new footage reveals how the film could have been different.
Can Comics Save Your Life?
In lockdown, one shop asked for people to submit comics of “a utopian world after we survive this moment.” Hundreds around the world answered.