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Jason Farago

Jason Farago is an art critic for The New York Times and the editor of the anthology Out of Practice: Ten Issues of “Even,” 2015–2018. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for art criticism. (April 2020)

IN THE REVIEW

Resistance Is Futile

Police arresting Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, New York City, November 2011

Overthrow

by Caleb Crain
Caleb Crain’s novel Overthrow is a roomy, even baggy tale of half a dozen young, idealistic Brooklynites who cross the East River in search of a new society. In the trough of the Lesser Depression, against Bloomberg’s police, within a mediascape in economic freefall, these kids imagine they can redeem not just themselves but the entire planet through the force of their emotional example, inspiring finer feelings and deeper loves than market logic allows.

Curation as Creation

Harald Szeemann (seated) on the last night of ‘Documenta 5: Questioning Reality—Image Worlds Today,’ Kassel, Germany, 1972

Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions

an exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, February 6–May 6, 2018; Kunsthalle Bern, June 9–September 2, 2018; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, October 13, 2018–January 20, 2019; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, February 26–May 26, 2019

Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us

an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, February 4–April 22, 2018; Gerechtigkeitsgasse 74, Bern, June 9–September 2, 2018; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, October 13, 2018–January 20, 2019; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, February 26–May 26, 2019; and Swiss Institute, New York City, June 28–August 18, 2019
A restaurant near my apartment sells “curated salads”; a home goods store sells “carefully curated sheets”; a babysitting agency offers “curated care”; my inbox bulges with curated newsletters, curated dating apps, curated wine programs. Kanye West, the Trumpist rapper, calls himself a curator, as do Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, and Josh Ostrovsky, who under the name the Fat Jew spews plagiarized jokes and alcohol advertising to millions of followers on social media. It’s been well over a decade now since the figure of the curator—a once auxiliary player in the world of art—became vulgarized and generalized in consumer society, and still its demented currency endures.

J’Accuse!

History of Violence

by Édouard Louis, translated from the French by Lorin Stein

Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis, translated from the French by Lorin Stein
The story begins late on Christmas Eve, 2012. Édouard is twenty years old, and he has left the apartment of friends in northeast Paris, where they have had a few bottles of wine. He takes a share-bike as far as the place de la République, and then, to clear his …

A Flag Is a Flag Is a Flag

Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture

edited by Roberta Bernstein with Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, Caitlin Sweeney, and Betsy Stepina Zinn

Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye

by Roberta Bernstein
A good mythology needs a Genesis story. For Jasper Johns, the dawn of creation came in the late fall of 1954, and was instigated not by divine revelation but something close to it: a vision in a dream.