Arts

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Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

September 19, 2024 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

September 19, 2024 issue

Adam Thirlwell

A Sternly Witty Sensualist

Karl Lagerfeld used reference and precise technique to elevate decoration to the level of a principle.

August 15, 2024 issue

Susan Tallman

The Sneaky Sublime

The Chicago artist Christina Ramberg recontextualized things built for another purpose, transforming the unremarkable into funny, stately, and transgressive forms.

August 15, 2024 issue

Colin Grant

Yearning for Redemption

Kingsley Ben-Adir’s performance as Bob Marley in One Love is seductive, but in treating the singer as a savior, the film loses sight of his complexity.

August 15, 2024 issue

Jed Perl

Reimagining the Ordinary

The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested.

July 18, 2024 issue

J. W. McCormack

‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’

Over seven seasons on NBC, Columbo put a charming, shambolic gloss on the crime show. Now it has a new generation of imitators.

August 25, 2024

Victoria Baena

Pitiless, Restless Brecht

A recent show of Bertolt Brecht’s collages and ephemera suggested that he viewed all his work as forever in progress.

August 22, 2024

En Pointe

Robert Gottlieb

The Art of Pleasing

It was the charm Margot Fonteyn radiated, the lovability, that made her so cherished by audiences for more than four decades.

December 2, 2004 issue

Joan Acocella

Secrets of Nijinsky

Nijinsky’s famous diary was the record of his thoughts as he began to go insane. To my knowledge, it is the only sustained written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.

January 14, 1999 issue

Fiona MacCarthy

Star

When it came to hissing Lola Montez would develop the hide of a rhinoceros.

June 20, 1996 issue

Eleanor Clark

Bad Housekeeping

Isadora Duncan’s vocabulary resounds with such period words as Woman, Beauty, Truth, Art, Glorious Vision. In spirit she was far more a pre-Raphaelite than a Marxist.

December 18, 1969 issue

On Songwriting

Mark Ford

She Shampooed & Renewed Us

For those who dreamed upward in the late 1960s, there was not only Woodstock, there was also its commemoration by Mitchell in her optimistic paean to the festival’s significance in her song of the same name.

October 26, 2017 issue

Lucy Sante

Dylan’s Time

Dylan, through his ambiguity, his ability to throw down puzzles that continue to echo and to generate interpretations, almost singlehandedly created a climate in which lyrics were taken seriously.

October 13, 2016

Paul Simon with his son Harper, June 7, 1973

Daniel Drake

Paul Simon: Fathers, Sons, Troubled Water

Paul Simon’s emotive, androgynous tenor and sensitive, imagistic songwriting have sustained a sixty-year career in American pop music that came to a close in September with three farewell concerts.

October 13, 2018

Bruce Springsteen performing at the Bottom Line, New York City, August 1975

Jon Pareles

Swept Away by Springsteen

For a generation or two of listeners, Springsteen has been rock’s steadfast working-class hero, the self-made superstar who never forgot where he came from and a flesh-and-blood affirmation of tenacity against long odds.

December 22, 2016 issue

The Latest

Daphne Merkin

The Bliss and the Risks

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

October 3, 2024 issue

Sarah Schulman

Ahead of the Diminishing World

Most of the bohemians Alice Neel painted were far from my own queer milieu in downtown New York—but when she turned to that world she captured it with energy and defiance.

September 8, 2024

Andrew Katzenstein

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

September 6, 2024

Brian Seibert

‘Carefully Plotted Chaos’

For decades the choreographer Twyla Tharp has been drawing on her past successes and even returning to earlier failures, looking to get it right this time.

August 21, 2024