Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – March 11, 2024

Barbie slaps Oppenheimer at the Academy Awards.
Art by Barry Blitt

The New Yorker (March 4, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Barry Blitt’s “Slappenheimer” – The artist revisits the infamous Oscars slap to riff on the tensions of this year’s ceremony.

Joe Biden’s Last Campaign

Joe Biden photographed at his desk in the Oval Office by Thea Traff.

Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection.

By Evan Osnos

Forty-Three Mexican Students Went Missing. What Really Happened to Them?

A man looks at photos of the missing students.

One night in 2014, a group of young men from a rural teachers’ college vanished. Since then, their families have fought for justice.

By Alma Guillermoprieto

Classical: The Mela Guitar Quartet – “Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture” (2024)

Omni Foundation (March 3, 2024): The Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts presents the Mēla Guitar Quartet performing the Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture by Mikhail Glinka from inside the West Dean Estate in the United Kingdom. This video is presented by the Omni Foundation’s Omni On-Location series, Concerts from Historic Sites.

Art Exhibitions: American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko’s Paintings

CBS Sunday Morning (March 3, 2024): His abstract expressionist canvases are among the most recognizable of all 20th century artists’ works. But Mark Rothko (1903-1970) also produced nearly 3,000 pieces on paper – smaller in scale but just as innovative.

CBS News chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa visits an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., that explores the trail of paper works the artist left behind, and talks with curator Adam Greenhalgh, and with the artist’s children, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, about Rothko’s remarkable vision.

Books: Literary Review Magazine – March 2024

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Literary Review – March 1, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Gaughin’s Midlife Crisis’; Geology vs Genesis; Japan’s War Trials; Saddam’s Blunderers and Barbara Comyns in Full…

Comedian Who Got Serious

“The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky” By Simon Shuster

As someone who has to consume quite a lot of Russian media, I can tell you that if there is one common denominator, it’s that whether we’re talking about a shouty TV news programme (less Newsnight, more a kind of geopolitical Jeremy Kyle Show), a stodgy government newspaper of record or a racy tabloid, no one has a good word for Volodymyr Zelensky. 

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Kubrick: An Odyssey By Robert P Kolker

There are, I have long suspected, two types of cinephiles: those who think Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a masterpiece and those who think it’s a relentless bore. Early in their new biography of the film director, Kubrick: An Odyssey, Robert P Kolker and Nathan Abrams make clear which camp they belong to, describing the scene in which the astronaut Frank Poole jogs around (and around and around and around) the spaceship Discovery as ‘one of the most lyrical passages in film history’. 

The New York Times Book Review – March 3, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 1, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Yakety-Yak’ – In “Language City”, Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in New York, the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis…

Kate DiCamillo Says ‘Paying Attention Is a Way to Love the World’

Credit…Rebecca Clarke

The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.

How to Speak New York

In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.

Art Insider: An Engineer Reviews Turner’s “Rain, Steam And Speed” (1844)

The National Gallery (March 1, 2024): Is there engineering in art, as well as art in engineering? We look at Turner’s famous depiction of a steam train in ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ and stormy seas in ‘Dutch Boats in a Gale’ (1801).

Rob Bell from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers gives us an engineer’s take on these two paintings at the National Gallery. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers was founded in 1847 and has over 100,000 members around the world.

Arts Preview: ARTFORUM Magazine – March 2024

March 2024
Paul Pfeiffer, Vitruvian Figure (detail), 2008

Artforum Magazine (March 1, 2024) – The latest issue features THE PURE PRODUCTS OF AMERICA GO CRAZY – Thomas Hirschhorn’s Fake It, Fake It – till you Fake It., 2023; ANTHONY LEPORE; PASSAGES –  PHILL NIBLOCK (1933–2024); TOP TENBRUCE LABRUCE and more…

SALON STYLE

Hurvin Anderson, Shear Cut, 2023, acrylic on paper on canvas, 84 3⁄4 × 92 1⁄4". From the series “Barbershop,” 2006–23.

Hurvin Anderson imagines the barbershop

HURVIN ANDERSON’S “BARBERSHOP” series belongs to a long tradition of painterly fascination with the spaces of social interaction that reflect both the physical realities and ideological aspirations of society at large. Anderson’s exhibition “Salon Paintings” at England’s Hastings Contemporary, organized in collaboration with the Hepworth Wakefield, also in England, and Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker, Norway, brings together a body of work he produced between 2006 and 2023 that portrays, albeit in the loosest sense of the word, men’s hair salons. 

“Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens”

“Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens”
View of “Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens,” 2023–24. From left: Ross Bleckner, Day and Night, Hour by Hour, 2023; Josephine Halvorson, Smiley Face, 2023. Photo: Jason Mandella.

Petzel Gallery | East 67th Street

By Donald Kuspit

“Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens,” a group exhibition that featured a selection of Renaissance paintings alongside works created by present-day artists, was a type of paragone, except that the debate was not whether painting or sculpture is the superior art form, but whether these historical pieces—executed at a time when grand themes and exquisite craft, among other criteria, determined their value—are better or worse than objects made by artists now, when such antiquated metrics seem well beside the point.

London Review Of Books – March 7, 2024 Preview

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London Review of Books (LRB) – February 1, 2024: The latest issue features Mothers and Others – ‘The Pole’ and Other Stories by  J.M. Coetzee….

Death of the Book

By Adam Smyth

Sometimes we ignore a book’s material presence: absorbed, ‘good’ reading is often figured as a forgetting of the material conditions of book, body, room and time, even though these conditions affect how we read. With certain other books it makes no sense to separate text from object.

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book 
by Brian Cummings.

Give your mom a gun

By Geoff Mann

There are seventy million more privately held guns in the US – around four hundred million of them – than there are people. AR-15s comprise about 5 per cent of the total, but it is currently the best-selling rifle in the country.

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson.

Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America 
by Andrew C. McKevitt.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement-March 1, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Married to Mr. Hardy’ – The writer’s complicated relationships with women; Southern discomfort; a bad deal on Wall Street…

Previews: Country Life Magazine – Feb 28, 2024

Country Life - Country Life

Country Life Magazine – February 27, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Britain’s Top Dogs’ – Our favorites, decade by decade