Detective Stories about Feelings: The Driving Force of Peter Schjeldahl
Most of us have never known an art world without Peter Schjeldahl in it. We count on him being part of New York like…
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Behind the Curtain: Beatriz González’s Political-Decorative Art
A familiar scene: two dandies basking in a casual lunch on the grass, immersed in delightful parlay, accompanied by a completely naked woman in…
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Dubious Icons: Godheads, Messiahs, and the Artist as Celebrity
Perhaps it’s an unfair caricature of MFA students, that each appears to inhabit their own personalized reality TV show. Perhaps. But having been one…
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Interrupting Business as Usual: A Close Reading of MoMA’s Muslim Ban Intervention
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently rehung its prized Modern galleries, swapping out works by greats like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso for…
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Interview: Paul Petro on Becoming the Legacy-Building, “Bent Identity Politics” Gallerist of Toronto
The spiritual iconographies of Paul Petro’s roster are many. Robert Flack’s seven chakras series from the 1990s; Stephen Andrews’s heaven painting, and The Apostles;…
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Understanding Lina Bo Bardi’s Unending Popularity (and Misuse)
Imagine the ghost of Lina Bo Bardi banging the ceiling with a broomstick to annoy whomever’s making a ruckus upstairs. Now imagine it’s not…
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How to See the Invisible
“An SEP,” he said, “is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that…
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The Inequality of Contemporary Art
In an 1854 painting called The Meeting, a young Gustave Courbet depicted himself encountering a rich art patron and his servant. Such was the…
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Helen Molesworth Upends the Permanent Hang at MOCA LA
Ruth Asawa spent the summer of 1948 making buttermilk for her teachers, Josef and Anni Albers, in Asheville, North Carolina. She was enrolled at…
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Nothing is Absolute: The Fairy-Winged Failure of “Absolute Beauty: Neoacademicism in Saint Petersburg”
Absolute Beauty’s curators Ekaterina Andreeva and Andrei Khlobystin have tasked themselves with an unsolvable puzzle: how to capture, in a medium-sized exhibition with limited…
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