Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation. He also writes regularly for such publications as New Left Review and Artforum (where is co-editor of international reviews). He has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College (University of London), among others. His most recent books include collections of poems, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, New York, 2015) and literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2018). In 2016 Verso (New York and London) published The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present, a selection of Schwabsky’s art criticism from The Nation.
How much of the pressure of reality can a work of art bear before it ceases to be art?
Did Chris Marker think history to be not only an infinite book but a sacred one?
A quartet of shows at MoMA decoct enlightenment from the banal.
Ed Clark and Lynda Benglis are still making art on a grand scale.
The Guggenheim’s Futurism exhibition and the Whitney Biennial offer competing visions of present-mindedness.
Ambitious beneath his pose of indolence, James McNeill Whistler was the most contradictory of artists.
Hunger games?… Snowden: necessity defense… “permission to fail”… “Czars & Samovars” redux…