"Everyone is in strategizing mode,” Ed Winkleman said over the phone from his gallery in Chelsea. He was echoing a feeling expressed by many New York art dealers who specialize in introducing the work of young artists to the market. “I was at a San Francisco gallery in ’89 when things were bad,” said Michael Read More
On May 8, the Dia Art Foundation appointed Yasmil Raymond, associate curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, as its next curator. In September, Ms. Raymond will succeed Lynne Cooke, who has held the position since 1991, and who will stay on at Dia as curator-at-large.
Dia Art Foundation director Philippe Vergne, who was Read More
Bruce Brubaker leaned forward, crowding the diner booth where he had been talking to The Observer for an hour, and posed the dissertation-ready question that had emerged after a conversation veering from Beethoven to Barthes to the novels of Thomas Bernhard: “You’d like to think, ‘I’m an artist. I have my original response to this Read More
On the evening of Tuesday, April 28, composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich will be in the audience at the 92nd Street Y, listening to the premiere of her latest work, Septet for Piano Trio and String Quartet, performed by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio together with Miami String Quartet. It will be the first time Ms. Zwilich has Read More
Jeff in Venice, Death in VaranasiBy Geoff DyerPantheon, $24.00, 295 pages
Meet Jeff Atman, aging hack journalist:
“He was supposed to be writing a twelve-hundred-word so-called ‘think piece’ (intended to require zero thought on the part of the reader and scarcely more from the writer but still, somehow, beyond him) that had reached such a pitch Read More
Art Forum correspondent Linda Yablonsky, Giant magazine editor-in-chief Emil Wilbekin and rapper Lupe Fiasco joined more than two dozen art and fashion world luminaries at chef Marcus Samuelsson's Aquavit restaurant in Midtown on Thursday, April 16, for a cocktail reception and dinner in support of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS' (RED) campaign, hosted by sneaker giant Converse.Thelma Read More
"I’m consciously trying to uproot my language and toss it and turn it,” said composer Phil Kline. “I just got unhappy with my own expression and I wanted to find new ways to go.”
Mr. Kline was talking about his recently released recording, a mass for string quartet called John the Revelator (Cantaloupe), and The Read More
The fans who filled the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea on Thursday night, April 2, to hear punk icon Patti Smith perform songs and original poetry inspired by the 19th century French writer Arthur Rimbaud bowed their heads as Ms. Smith intoned the literary rebel's last words: ''I am completely paralyzed, and so I wish to Read More
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau appeared to relish the press corps' befuddlement at his explanation of art dealer Larry Salander's alleged scam to bilk investors, collectors, banks and galleries of some $88 million. So he put it simply: "He sold paintings he didn't own!" Mr. Morgenthau on Thursday, March 26, announced a 100-count indictment against Read More
Last week, a visitor to my apartment told me the knickknacks on my mantel were “beautifully curated.” People, if it’s not art, and it’s not in a museum, it’s stuff you “chose” or maybe “picked,” or, if you must dress it up, “selected and arranged.” O.K.?
Good. Now onto this season’s exhibitions. MoMA’s got Read More
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War By Alexander Waugh Doubleday, 366 pages, $27.50
With apologies to his cult, here’s a sound bite version of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: A concept is good when it’s exactly as rigorous as it needs to be. If your concept is too vague, it will lead you Read More
Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz AgeBy D.J. TaylorFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 361 pages, $27British tabloids of the 1920s bestowed the sobriquet “Bright Young People” on the generation born near the turn of the century, a generation alienated from older siblings traumatized and decimated by the Great War, and even more alienated Read More
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern LifeBy Adam GopnikAlfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $24.95
Banquet at Delmonico’s:Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in AmericaBy Barry WerthRandom House, 362 pages, $27
“Fifty years ago no one would have chosen Darwin and Lincoln as central figures of the modern imagination,” Read More
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human EvolutionBy Denis DuttonBloomsbury Press, 243 pages, $25
Soon after Denis Dutton, a professor of the philosophy of art at a New Zealand university, founded the Web site Arts & Letters Daily in 1998, it became known as the Internet’s most reliable source of the type of writing to which Read More
A good thriller writer shares two things with a con man: He tricks you into trusting him, and he takes you for all you’re worth. If he’s good, you fall for the hustle. And if he’s really good, you’ll be entertained even as you’re being suckered.
In sentences Read More
