Arts

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The House That Johns Built

What has Jasper Johns done for us lately? As two exhibitions show, pretty much what he did for us in the first place: continually disrupt the mental shorthand that converts complex visual experience into simple mental categories.

January 13, 2022 issue

James Shapiro

Shakespeare Noir

There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment.

January 13, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Notes from Underground

Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character.

January 13, 2022 issue

Andrew Martin

Castle’s Kingdom

James Castle’s drawings and constructions seem to have been beamed in from a parallel universe of art-making and do not easily yield their meanings.

January 13, 2022 issue

Ian Frazier

‘Part of Why We Survived’

A new history of the long tradition of Native comedy, inside and outside mainstream entertainment

January 13, 2022 issue

Robert Pogue Harrison

Labors of Love

Inspired new translations of Dante’s Purgatorio are faithful to its message of rehabilitation, reconciliation, and redemption.

December 16, 2021 issue

Ben Lerner

Force of Gravity

Steffani Jemison’s videos activate questions of visibility and knowability, of the relation between exterior and interior, with an astonishing economy of means.

December 16, 2021 issue

Lorrie Moore

The Tender Trap

We ask marriage to provide personal growth plus affectionate companionship, sexual appreciation, and spiritual renewal. Can it sustain that expectation?

December 16, 2021 issue

The Latest

Colm Tóibín

Picasso’s Obsessions

The last volume of John Richardson’s biography documents the rivalry between Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter for the painter’s attention and his intense engagement with depicting them.

February 10, 2022 issue

Adam Kirsch

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

February 10, 2022 issue

Mark Yakich

Language Is the Game in ‘Ted Lasso’

Whitman and Joyce may seem unlikely references for a sports sitcom—unless we’ve been reading the show all wrong.

January 19, 2022

John Broadley

A Whiff of Toner and Lead

“I never have the confidence to make large pieces with a single, stark image, but have this desire to bombard people with lots of details.”

December 24, 2021

Edwidge Danticat

Haiti Reframed

By bringing to life on screen a neighborhood poised between trouble and joy, Gessica Généus’s Freda offers a richly textured dissent from infantilizing accounts of her country.

December 21, 2021

Nicole Rudick

Tethered Histories

Mayer’s fabric art and ephemeral installations were both feminist and humanist, linking great spans of time with individual experience.

December 9, 2021

J. Hoberman

A Conceptual Artist of Cinema

Now ninety-two, the Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow is receiving a retrospective of a career that brought a playful avant-garde sensibility to the moving image.

December 3, 2021

James Quandt

Body Awareness

The mercurial Austrian artist Maria Lassnig made extreme, unsparing paintings that attempt to translate corporeal sensations and ephemeral perceptions onto the canvas, but her films reveal a gentler side of her work.

December 16, 2021 issue

Coco Fusco

Whose Art Thrives in Cuba?

Art and dance were battlegrounds for the struggle to define the meaning of the revolution.

December 16, 2021 issue

Greil Marcus

A Ride on the Velvet Underground

Revolving around Lou Reed and John Cale, Todd Haynes’s documentary on the avant-garde rock band is itself an art project in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

November 18, 2021