Unlovable
Arthur C. Danto
The contemporary art world, reflected in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, is themeless and heading in no identifiable direction.
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Every Photo an Archive
Susie Linfield
Peppered with moving, thought-provoking elements, the photographic exhibition "Archive Fever" is fascinating but essentially incoherent.
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Spots, Smudges and Glitter
Barry Schwabsky
A tour of the New York art galleries reveals a number of talented artists exploring the possibilities of "bad" representational painting.
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Just Looking
Arthur C. Danto
Mapping the difficulty, danger and beauty in the art of Nicholas Poussin.
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Daring Intransigence
Barry Schwabsky
Gustave Courbet's blunt pictorial style and taciturn sensibility prefigured the ambivalence and photographic exactitude of modern painting.
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The Where of It
Barry Schwabsky
The best location for Lawrence Weiner's conceptual art is in the viewer's own imagination.
2007
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Tilted Ash
Arthur C. Danto : Architecture & Design
A retrospective exhibition of Martin Puryear's sculptures reinvents MoMA's signature atrium space as a site for spiritual longing.
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The Madman and the Poet
In a new collection of poems by the mentally ill Czech dissident Ivan Blatný, the world and the poet's interpretations of it are continuously transforming.
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A Kind of Waiting Always
A new book of Rod Smith's poems maps the geometry of social life in thoughts and phrases.
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Dark Rooms
Susie Linfield : Media Analysis
The photographers who documented the Spanish Civil War captured the heart of battle in ways that now seem iconic but were then radically new.
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Love by a Thousand Cuts
Museums can't get enough of Kara Walker, whose silhouettes of the history of slavery seem to be a nightmare she's trying to enjoy.
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The Imperfectionist
Reconsidering the life and legacy of avant-garde artist and poet Francis Picabia.
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Strange Culture
Patricia J. Williams : Civil Rights & Liberties
If the stuff of life is corporatized, does art about it become a form of interference in business?
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Artists Pursue the Disappeared
Marian Schlotterbeck : Argentina
With greater efficiency than the slow efforts for truth and justice, a traveling art exhibition bears witness to the victims of Argentina's "dirty war."
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Breaking and Entering
Gordon Matta-Clark's art displays how empty spaces illuminate the structures they are housed in.
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Cinema Studies
The staged images in Jeff Wall's photographs mirror the fictional glamour of film stills and formal painting.
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Scenes From Hell
An apocalyptic vision of the Bush Administration, from Houston artist Lynn Randolph.
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Fevered Imagination
Lawrence Weschler : Environmental Activism
Artists try to wake up a sleepwalking public to the dangers of climate change.
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A Mannerist in Madrid
Jacopo Tintoretto outshines Michelangelo, but his work is rarely seen outside of Venice.
2006
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A Painter of Our Time
Diego Velázquez was a restless innovator, a painter who slyly revealed the ordinariness of his exalted subjects--one is almost tempted to call him modern.
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The Body in Pain
Fernando Botero's latest series of paintings, inspired by the Abu Ghraib photos, immerse us in the experience of suffering in a way the original photographs never did.
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Whose Art Is It Anyway?
Peter Plagens : Government & the Arts
Two books on art controversies and arts funding in America explore how and when taxpayer money can be used to support public art.
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Modern Love
Two new biographies of Clement Greenberg take the measure of an ambitious art critic who had a knack for predicting success.
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Stargazer
Andy Warhol's eye for significant banality transformed the familiar into art. Ric Burns's new American Masters documentary traces the roots of Warhol's smirking genius.
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Guernica, Again
Nicholas von Hoffman : History
The targeting of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon summons the image of Picasso's wrenching mural that memorialized innocents caught in the crossfire.
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All About Eva
In the late '60's, Eva Hesse's ambitious sculptures challenged the art world. Collected in a new exhibition, her art is even greater today.
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The Body Artist
Two biographies of Thomas Eakins reveal the art world's attitudes about the painter's bodily obsessions: Was he a curious innocent, a brilliant anatomist or a dirty old man?
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I'll Be Your Mirror
The art on display at the Whitney Biennial 2006 doesn't have to tell us it's not morning in America: We know that by watching the evening news.
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Alice Walton's Fig Leaf
Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton is on a buying spree, filling her Arkansas museum with America's cultural treasures--a fig leaf that seeks to cover Wal-Mart's naked greed and exploitation.
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Soul Eyes
Fra Angelico's genius for depicting the interior life--states of love, spirituality or anguish--is stirring the interest of contemporary artists.
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Live Flesh
In no other body of work is the sexuality of human flesh explored as truthfully as in the transgressive, erotically charged images created by Egon Schiele.
2005
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Rembrandt's Year
Abigail R. Esman : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
2006 marks Rembrandt's 400th birthday, and an array of exhibitions, from the sublime to the silly, will open in Amsterdam, Washington and beyond. As the aesthetic hype escalates, can great art withstand great commerce? Can consummate genius triumph over cute?
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The Look of Truth
Peter Plagens : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Photographs are supposed to be unbiased recognitions of reality, but they're really self-portraits of the photographer. The Ongoing Movement, a blend of biography and analysis, examines what happens when photographers create deliberately untruthful pictures.
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Octoberfest
Barry Schwabsky : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Four editors of October magazine trace the history of contemporary art. Though Art Since 1900 seeks to be comprehensive, its writers leave out entire movements and impose moralistic judgments on the artists and art they profile.
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Salvador Memories
An exhibit at the International Center of Photography showcasing the brutal images of the civil war in El Salvador should remind the Pentagon and the public that the "Salvador Option" currently considered by the military leads directly to the charnel house.
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How Art Can Save Your Life
Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa is a celebration of the intersection between art and life and the random genius of the unexpected.
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The American Sublime
Robert Smithson's epic earthwork, Spiral Jetty tends to render critics speechless.
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The Philosophy of Art
Arthur Danto talks about art in America, the rise of pluralism and how The Nation changed his life.
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Flyboy in the Buttermilk
Arthur C. Danto : African-Americans
Basquiat's work, now in Brooklyn, was close to the best the art world had to offer in his day.
2004
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Pop and Circumstance
Hensbergen's "biography" is the eleventh book (in English) devoted to Picasso's mural Guernica.
2003
2002
2001
1999
This week: Will racism or sexism win the day? Plus: Esther Kaplan on workplace safety and Steven Greenhouse on the struggle facing younger workers. (13mb mp3)
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