Celebrating Community
My last in person museum experience was at the MoMa in February. As the months have passed and the pandemic still rages on, I have been eager to engage with new art in an immersive way. UNTITLED’s (a contemporary art fair organizer) inaugural VR art fair, UNTITLED Art Online (running from July 29th through August 9th), looked like a promising […]
In Donald Trump’s America, there’s no wall between reality and screenland. When he lazily entered the 2016 presidential race on a golden Trump Tower escalator, it resembled a dress rehearsal for an SNL parody of The Apprentice. Scenes of Black Lives Matter protestors gassed by riot police and refugee children at the southern border packed into chain-link cages could have […]
Review of The Paperback Guy: Words from the Sidewalk by Kurt Brokaw For over thirty years of Sundays, Kurt Brokaw has hauled a table to Broadway (somewhere between Lincoln Center and specialty food store Zabar’s) to set up shop on the sidewalk. He’s there to sell his collection of pulp fiction magazines and vintage paperbacks from the ‘40s and ‘50s. […]
Nearly 60 years ago, Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne was sent to Saigon to report on the conflict between the Communist North and American-backed South. He was soon joined in the AP bureau by Peter Arnett and photojournalist Horst Faas, and they found themselves competing with upstart UPI reporter Neil Sheehan and brash New York Times journalist David Halberstam on […]
Review of Trixie and Katya’s Guide to Modern Womanhood by Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova by Michael Quinn In the tradition of great comedy duos that include Bill and Ted, Beevis and Butt-Head and Abbott and Costello, Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova bring playfulness, nuttiness, and irreverent, off-the-wall humor to the lifestyle and self-help space with Trixie and Katya’s Guide […]
The New York City art scene has been finding ways to thrive in the middle of this pandemic. Kentler International Drawing Space, which has been on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook since 1990, has figured out ways to continue to dialogue with the public. Their latest show, In Reflection: Selections from the Kentler Flatfiles went live on their website […]
The Brera Library, as known as Braidense, is the Italian national library, founded in Milan in 1770 by the Hapsburg empress Mary Therese when Italy was not united and Lombardy was under Austrian control. Today it is one of the main book depositories in Italy as it collects all the publications printed in Milan, where the majority of Italians books […]
Review of Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski James Baldwin, the late black, gay, American writer, used his work to boldly explore racial and social issues. According to Baldwin, his 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room (about an American man in Paris who falls in love with an Italian bartender) was “not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if […]
For months now, New Yorkers have been bent out of shape, either cooped up at home or stretched thin on the front line of what’s happening during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s strange to think of the world we all inhabited a few months ago, the casual freedoms we enjoyed: seeing friends, going out to eat. In his ambitious illustrated history […]
During the first phase of the shutdown, art galleries were forced to close everywhere. Private galleries have long functioned within the art market as a crucial link between artists and their audience: critics, collectors, and the general public. But today, the “art market is in apnea,” said Pietro Gagliardi, owner of the Gagliardi Domke, one of the biggest contemporary galleries […]