Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

Max Nelson

Alone Together in Taipei

Intimacy in Tsai Ming-liang’s films is an elusive possession, but the desire for it is constant and always particular.

June 10, 2021 issue

Carole Naggar

Marc Riboud’s Roving Lens

A retrospective conveys the breadth and close attention of this Magnum photographer as he traveled the world.

May 1, 2021

Adam Shatz

A Blues Surrealist

Julius Hemphill’s music uses stark, lyrical abstraction and svelte dissonances to confront the vicissitudes of black American life.

May 27, 2021 issue

John Banville

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

May 13, 2021 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

May 13, 2021 issue

Hilton Als

Remembrance of Things Past

Catherine Opie is interested in where her subjects are on the inside at the moment she’s taking a photograph.

May 13, 2021 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Young and in Love

Salman Toor’s absorbing show at the Whitney depicts the pleasures, tensions, and small moments of gay life.

April 8, 2021 issue

The Latest

Carole Naggar

Tokyo Street Theater

Together, the careers of Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama span Japan’s postwar experience. What unites the two photographers, above all, is their central protagonist: the city.

July 23, 2021

James Romm

The Magnificence of the Medicis

To the Florentine dynasts, art patronage was power expressed in pigment, but as a new show at the Met highlights, it left a legacy of incalculable value.

July 17, 2021

Phil Penman

New York, Anew

As the city emerges from long pandemic hibernation, New Yorkers tell how they survived it and what their hopes are for the future.

July 10, 2021

Molly Crabapple

A Miniaturist Goes Large

The Pakistani-American painter Shahzia Sikander’s retrospective showcases the way she has turned a traditional form into an exuberant medium for overthrowing empires.

July 8, 2021

Lorrie Moore

The Inspired Bricolage of Bruno Mars

The pop artist is sometimes disparaged as a charismatic impersonator of others’ music, but that misses his talent for truly inhabiting what he borrows and making something moving and new.

July 2, 2021

Jed Perl

Interpreting Nature

A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

July 22, 2021 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Freedom for Sale

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

July 22, 2021 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Daydream Kingdoms

Susan Te Kahurangi King’s art presents a visual, psychological, and expressive upside-down world.

July 22, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

June 19, 2021