Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

Inside the Music

The decline of traditional newspaper reviews of new music offers an opportunity to expand our ideas of what music criticism could be.

November 6, 2025 issue

Jed Perl

Impassioned Ferocity

A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.

November 6, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

The Escape Artists

Mason Bates’s operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay condenses the encyclopedic novel into a story about two outsiders caught between the harsh reality of World War II and their success as creators of a comic book superhero.

November 6, 2025 issue

Nicole Rudick

Becoming Acquainted with America

From the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, Ben Shahn sent a clear message in his art about individual people and the conditions that oppressed them.

October 23, 2025 issue

Hari Kunzru

Surviving the Manosphere

Adolescence illustrates how, in the hypercapitalist competition of toxic masculinity online, teenagers have the most to lose.

October 9, 2025 issue

Catherine Nicholson

The Cares of State

The scholar Nan Z. Da reveals how naturally Chinese history can be read through the cruelty and corruption in King Lear.

October 9, 2025 issue

Martin Filler

What Joys Lie in Store

Can Printemps New York recapture the commercial sorcery of glamorous department stores like Wanamaker’s, Barney’s, and Bloomingdale’s?

September 25, 2025 issue

Maira Kalman

On Devil’s Island

November 6, 2025 issue

Conversations with Artists

Salamishah Tillet

‘I Wanted to Paint What I Know’: An Interview with Jordan Casteel

Casteel’s first solo exhibition in New York City, ‘Within Reach,’ is a collection of large-scale oil portraits, on view at the New Museum for just one more week.

December 26, 2020

Claudia Dreifus

An Interview with Art Spiegelman

If you were drawing Donald Trump as an animal, who would he be? A very conventional part of my brain goes, “He’s a… wild boar.” Except that pigs are intelligent. Now I have drawn him as bloated frog. More recently, I drew him as a large turd.

April 13, 2018

A sign reading "How much of love is attention?" from Chloë Bass's "Wayfinding," St. Nicholas Park, Harlem, 2019

Emily Raboteau

An Interview with Artist Chloë Bass

I first encountered the work of conceptual artist Chloë Bass when I came upon a reflective billboard—a giant mirror—planted in the grass of Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park, with the words “How much of love is attention?” written across it.

August 19, 2020

On Dance

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

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

Joan Acocella (1945–2024)

Joan Acocella

Joan Acocella

Dancing for Balanchine

October 11, 1990 issue

Joan Acocella

On Tap

June 6, 1996 issue

Joan Acocella

The Neapolitan Finger

December 21, 2000 issue

Joan Acocella

The Elmore Leonard Story

September 24, 2015 issue

Joan Acocella

Crotch Shots Galore

May 24, 2018 issue

Joan Acocella

From Russia, with Love

May 25, 2023 issue

The Latest

Francesca Wade

‘One Being Dancing’

In her latest performance, the eighty-five-year-old dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs takes up one of her great influences: the work of Gertrude Stein.

October 10, 2025

Ken Chen

Serene and Delirious

Both the strengths and weaknesses of Miguel Gomes’s films come from their commitment to capturing the porousness of life.

October 5, 2025

Rachel Cohen

Catching Us Looking

Gustave Caillebotte subverts our expectations about lines of sight and lines of desire.

September 30, 2025

Adam Thirlwell

When and Where Is Home?

The South Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s replicas of places he has lived are extraordinary feats of magical engineering.

October 9, 2025 issue

Leslie T. Chang

At the Chinese Table

To understand the Chinese through their culinary history is to see them in their best lights—as inventive, adaptable, egalitarian, and open-minded.

October 9, 2025 issue

Sasha Abramsky

Ahead of the Game

Althea Gibson, one of the great tennis players of the twentieth century, made segregation in her sport untenable.

September 25, 2025 issue

Daphne Merkin

Poolside

On a broiling summer afternoon I am lying on a chaise, daydreaming about past lovers and abandoned plans. But the water beckons, promising always that we can begin our lives anew.

August 29, 2025

Alexander Stille

Killing the Moonlight

A recent exhibition of Futurism at Italy’s national modern art museum celebrated the movement’s techno-optimism and played down its fascist roots.

August 24, 2025

Dennis Zhou

Hong Kong Plays Itself

Over the past decade, the filmmaker Chan Hau Chun has kept seeking new ways to capture how Hong Kong’s residents navigate its ambiguity and indeterminacy.

August 23, 2025