It’s finally spring and we’ve settled comfortably in 2015’s controversies and think pieces, its soundtrack and landscape, its must-sees and many of its premieres and releases. But never fear: There ...
Tag: Visual Culture
Invasion of the Funny Animals
“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny ...
Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned ...
Summer in Snow Country: A Sound and Photo Essay
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Less than two hours from Tokyo Station by bullet train, the village of Osaki is ...
Otherworlds
In the history of modern comics—as in the history of comic’s cousin, film—there have long been two competing impulses. Film history contrasts the styles of two pioneers: the documentary realism of ...
Public Picks 2014
Welcome to the second annual edition of Public Picks, a selection of the books and art that most interested and excited our editorial staff over the past year. As in last year’s Picks, we aimed for a ...
Edible Comics
Comics and food have a longstanding relationship, most spectacularly in a unique genre known in Japan, its country of origin, as ryôri manga, or cooking comics. These are comics entirely devoted to ...
Carrie Mae Weems at the Guggenheim
The Carrie Mae Weems retrospective cries out for the spiral at the Guggenheim. But instead 30 years of work, asking bigger and bigger questions, is split across two side galleries two floors apart ...
Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of ...
Changing Landscapes
The Museum of Modern Art recently completed its 13th annual Documentary Fortnight, a two-week festival of international nonfiction film. In a city flush with film screenings, the Fortnight is notable ...
At the Wall
The title of Donna Tartt’s latest best-selling novel comes from a painting of a small bird by Carel Fabritius that hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. A student of Rembrandt’s and an influence on ...
Origin Stories
There are many mornings when I cannot help but express my gratitude that I did not come of age in this current generation. As a father of two Millennials and a teacher of hundreds more, I know that ...
The Democratic Surround: A Conversation Between Fred Turner and Clay Shirky
Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of ...
Working Girls
“A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance,” writes Hannah Horvath (played by show creator Lena Dunham) in the final episode of the second season of the HBO ...
The Restless Storyteller: An Interview With Laura Bolaños Cadena
Historia Semanal de Amor y Pasión (Weekly Story of Love and Passion) is one of those pocket-size Mexican comic books you may have read or seen—they’re called historietas. The covers are illustrated ...
Alexis Rockman: Drawings from Life of Pi; with A Letter to the Artist
Public Books is pleased to present our first collaboration with the Lyon-based cultural institute Villa Gillet in connection with their fall Walls and Bridges festival in New York City. From October ...
All About the Clothes
Though Grace Coddington is well-known in her native Britain by lovers of London’s Swinging Sixties, most Americans only learned who she was from the 2009 documentary about the making of Vogue’s ...
Wanting Out
I can remember the first time I met Mark Anthony Neal. I was a graduate student, and he was visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching a class entitled “(Il)Legible Blackness.” The ...
War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via ...
Game of Chance
The narrator of Alexandra Chasin’s novella, Brief, displays a close rhetorical kinship with Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. An art vandal of indeterminate gender, s/he defends an act of ...