Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

Keep Your Eye on the Kid

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

October 20, 2022 issue

Mary Wellesley

Lice and Licentiousness

Hair in the medieval period was a marker of identity, a symbol of power, and a focus of erotic interest, freighted with religious significance.

October 20, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

Janique Vigier

His Dreaminess Had Will

In the last three years of his life, the elusive New York artist Ray Johnson picked up what he called a “new career as a photographer.” His late pictures were a final message, prank, secret, or gift.

September 26, 2022

Hilton Als

Godard’s Women

Cinema is a gift in that it allows for exposition—the betrayal of secrets—in frame after frame, actress by actress.

September 23, 2022

Bench Ansfield

A Theater of State Panic

Beginning in 1967, the Army built fake towns to train police and military officers in counterinsurgency. Sierra Pettengill’s new documentary lays bare the fears and false promises behind them.

September 16, 2022

Noah Isenberg

Clinging to Hollywood’s Underbelly

The B-movie director Hugo Fregonese—whose career led from Argentina to Hollywood and Europe—was preoccupied with the search for freedom in a violent world.

September 12, 2022

Jenny Uglow

Lear’s Lyrical Coasts

The seascapes that Edward Lear sketched on his travels around the Mediterranean are thresholds and boundaries that ask: To stay, or go?

September 8, 2022

On Dance

Sonia Delaunay: Danseuse, deuxieme version, 1916

Clair Wills

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

August 20, 2020 issue

A scene in the Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadère, 1900; from Marius Petipa: La Dansomanie, a two-volume album in three languages published last year by the St. Petersburg Museum of Theater and Music to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Petipa’s birth

Joan Acocella

Souls in Single File

On Marius Petipa, the most productive and influential ballet choreographer of the late nineteenth century.

December 19, 2019 issue

Dancers of the New York City Ballet performing George Balanchine’s Serenade at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia, July 2003

Jennifer Homans

Hail Balanchine

‘Serenade’ has no story or narrative. It is internal—inward, like the music, and more of a prayer or ritual than a theatrical spectacle.

December 21, 2017 issue

Larry Wolff

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Endless Summer

Brian Wilson’s songs still have the power to astonish on their own terms, from their own time.

October 6, 2022 issue

Martin Filler

Xanadu’s Architect

Despite designing over seven hundred buildings, the pioneering female architect Julia Morgan is now best known for a single, extremely eccentric commission: San Simeon, the estate of the legendary newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst.

September 22, 2022 issue

Blair McClendon

A Brutal Place Playing at Paradise

The filmmaker James Benning invites us to look closely at American landscapes and peer into their history.

August 31, 2022

Joe Bucciero

Clear but Not Cold

An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou explores the contradictions of a Weimar-era cultural movement that strove for fidelity “to positive palpable reality.”

August 25, 2022

Phoebe Chen

Perfect Recall

In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film, a Scottish orchidologist moves through Colombia in pursuit of a lone, mysterious sound.

August 18, 2022

Rachel Eisendrath

I Killed a Man Back There

If, as Hamlet claims, every play holds a “mirror up to nature,” what kind of mirror is Robert Icke’s production?

August 10, 2022

Lucy Scholes

Made Alone and Imperatively

The British painter Maeve Gilmore found her muse in family and the home—but that refuge was not an idyll.

August 5, 2022

Sheila Liming

Old Story, New Money

The Gilded Age plunders Edith Wharton’s books for period-appropriate ideas but revels in all the surfaces Wharton sought to puncture.

August 3, 2022

Cintra Wilson

Downtown Confessional

John Lurie’s memoir is a tell-all that settles old accounts and names names, a cantankerous lament over his many existential and terrestrial irritations.

August 18, 2022 issue