How the Art World Worked in a Non-market Context

Biennales are experiments with proximity. They reconfigure spaces with art, sound or bodies, temporarily disrupting the usual rhythms of their host environments. In Lahore...

Éliane Radigue’s three-part composition Trilogie de la Mort is a masterwork on passages through death and life, grief and rebirth. Subtle and potent, it is built upon the amplification of sounds that oscillate, spiral, hiss, recede and swell.

Recently, I learned of the passing of Fakir Musafar, the renowned body artist whose professional and creative life (and, as far as I know, personal life, as well)

I first read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy as a young teen; it felt like a revelation. The books had a rough-textured animal-breath closeness that I had rarely encountered before...

In the 1980s, having a poster of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in my college dorm room made me feel sophisticated and grown-up: I’m living in New York, it announced....

Byung-Chul Han’s writing breezes across the pages of Shanzhai. Laconic in style and concise in argument, this short book briefly outlines and illustrates some deceptively intricate arguments...

Quite possibly one of the more enigmatic lines from a text that is always already an enigma.

Whoever decided to keep the most art per square mile anywhere in the world below sea level had a singular faith in human civilization...

There was a point somewhere between birth and puberty when I would spend hours drawing pictures of bearded men. What interested me most was the beards themselves...

A dozen women sitting on the streets in Warsaw were surrounded by middle-aged male protestors wearing ‘football hooligan’ red-and-white scarves. There were insults, kicking...

The path of Alessandro Agudio’s artistic practice intersects with some of this story: an important moment of institutional recognition for his work was his inclusion in Ennesima...

In May 1913, German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote to the poet and essayist Margarete von Bendemann to express his joy at seeing some ‘magnificent Rembrandts’.

George Bernard Shaw on Henrik Ibsen, Vladimir Nabokov on Nikolai Gogol, Henry Miller on Arthur Rimbaud, Nicholson Baker on John Updike: we are familiar with the genre in which authors write appreciatively about an admired predecessor...

Alessio Bolzoni’s sophomore effort finds him intimate with the human form. The photographer’s new book, Abuse II, The Uncanny, features tense shots...

How does a deeply read, supremely pyrotechnic wordsmith, pioneer of cyberculture who popularized culture jamming and first articulated the notion of Afrofuturism...

Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact...

Even the best of us, in our tender years, were at some moments cruel to other children. But did you also instruct those you bullied to transform...

In Bacon’s Studies of the Human Body (1970), a panel pays skewed homage to Caravaggio’s Narcissus or a Narcissus by the Caravaggisti.

A prevailing notion of the lives of artists holds that hedonism is a meaningful part of production. The slide projector on the subject has no shortage of famous faces: There’s boozy Faulkner, banging out novels and screenplays while pickled...