Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

Welcome to our new website. Read the introductory letter from our editors.

Jacob Lawrence: Massacre in Boston, 12 x 16 inches, 1954–1955; panel 2 from Struggle: From the History of the American People

The Revolutionary Jacob Lawrence

‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ charts the strife of early US history in a fierce Cubist/Expressionist style.

November 5, 2020 issue

Pierre Boulez; illustration by Tom Bachtell

Matthew Aucoin

The Fury of Pierre Boulez

A collection of his lectures on music reveals the composer’s narrow-mindedness and disdain.

November 5, 2020 issue

a film by Michael Almereyda

Chris Killip: Skinningrove

Photographer Chris Killip presents a group of largely unpublished pictures from the village of Skinningrove in North Yorkshire.

July 22, 2014

Emmanuel Iduma

Italy's History in Africa Reframed

By juxtaposing photographs from Catania and Nefasit, artist Dawit L. Petros suggests a connection between the migration of East Africans to Italy and the legacy of colonialism.

October 3, 2020

Clair Wills

Stepping Out

I hold hands with strangers. I do it quite often, and for long minutes at a time.

August 20, 2020 issue

Gerhard Richter: Group of People, 66 15/16 x 78 3/4 inches, 1965

Susan Tallman

The Master of Unknowing

Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.

May 14, 2020 issue

Buku Sarkar

Sharmila, the Chaiwalla, and Me

I began to visit the women in the Basti almost every day. I promised I would make a book about them. I called them my Saturday Morning Laundry Ladies. They called me Photowali Didi.

September 14, 2020

Panels from Count Screwloose of Tooloose by Milt Gross, April 5, 1931

Art Spiegelman

Foolish Questions

The subversive joy and nonsense of comics

March 12, 2020 issue

The Latest

Michael Govan

The Redesign of LACMA: An Exchange

October 23, 2020

Kaleem Hawa

The Militant Film of the PLO

The Palestine Film Unit emerged in the late 1960s with the aim of situating Palestine in the global anti-colonial struggle.

October 17, 2020

Shirley Clarke as herself in Agnès Varda's Lions Love (...and Lies), 1969

Sarah Cowan

Shirley Clarke’s Camera

Portrait of Jason is avant-garde in that filmmaker Shirley Clarke offers no proxy for the exploitative filmmaker, but the enduring question is whether Clarke was intentionally damning herself.

October 10, 2020

Joseph Giovannini

The Demolition of LACMA

Asked recently at a dinner party what he thought of the new building design, Frank Gehry simply draped a napkin over his head.

October 2, 2020

Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik performing John Cage’s 26'1.1499'' for a String Player, 1965; photograph by Peter Moore

Brian Dillon

Chaos and Cathode Rays

October 22, 2020 issue

Luca Marinelli in Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, 2019

J. Hoberman

Self-Made Men

October 22, 2020 issue

Accra Shepp

An Interview with Archie Shepp

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, was a revolutionary, both musically and politically.

September 29, 2020

Stanley Crouch playing drums at the Jazz Journalists Association awards at B.B. King’s, New York City, 2004

Adam Shatz

The Stanley Crouch I Knew

What Stanley believed in, I think, was calling things as he saw them even if it meant speaking hard truths, which used to be the business of critics. He left a number of bruises.

September 24, 2020

Richard Wagner; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Jed Perl

The Cults of Wagner

Alex Ross’s ‘Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music’

October 8, 2020 issue

Imogen Greenhalgh

An Interview with Chantal Joffe

Chantal Joffe’s signature quicksilver strokes are tender, yet devoid of sentimentality. With each sweeping stroke, she charts life on the point where things change—adolescence, pregnancy, grief, old age.

September 19, 2020