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+8 +1
At Last, a Black History Museum
When I was sixteen and growing up in New Orleans, I stole a bottle of liquor from a supermarket and was caught. The judge sentenced me to the mild punishment for white teens, a tour of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. “Go up to Angola, son,” he said, “then after that your record’s wapped clean…” By Edward Ball.
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+8 +1
Eggleston’s Empty America
In William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest: Selected Works, the photographer’s charge to himself seems to be, “Make a picture of nothing at all,” the emptiness takes on a special character. By Alexander Nemerov.
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+41 +1
Enter ‘The Glass Room,’ Where Privacy Goes To Die
A new temporary exhibition in New York City offers an up-close look at the tools of the surveillance state—and how to fight them. By Joshua Kopstein.
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+10 +1
Top 10 art installations of 2016
Designboom rounds-up the top 10 art installations of 2016, whether they be temporary, public, permanently fixed, interactive, or informative.
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+6 +1
The Intimate Spectacle of “Public, Private, Secret”
Zack Hatfield contemplates secrecy as he surveys “Public, Private, Secret,” the latest exhibit at the International Center for Photography.
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+38 +1
Face of 9,500-Year-Old Man Revealed for First Time
Digital tools help researchers reconstruct the Neolithic man inside the famed Jericho Skull.
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+35 +1
The Strange Case of the Minnesota Iceman
The modern-day corpse of a human-like hominid, preserved in a block of ice, encountered by researchers in the 1960s, you say? Surely the zoological discovery of the century! By Darren Naish.
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+14 +1
Independent life
The life and work of Paul Nash at the Tate. By Alice Spawls.
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+25 +1
A Secret Jew, the New World, a Lost Book: Mystery Solved
An octogenarian cracks the case of a missing prized manuscript by Luis de Carvajal the Younger that surfaced on sale for a fraction of its value. By Joseph Berger. (Jan. 1, 2017)
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+14 +1
Embracing the Vulgar
What is vulgar? The word’s many meanings and many forms are at the heart of “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined,” an expansive exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. The show takes shape around eleven categories of vulgarity conceived by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, like “Puritan,” “Impossible Ambition,” and “Showing Off.” Each is explored through clothing, shoes, and texts spanning the eighteenth century through the present. By Hilary Reid.
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+18 +1
An Unexpected Encounter with Set Theory in the Wild
How a routine trip to the art museum became a meditation on the empty set. By Evelyn Lamb.
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+28 +1
When Art Meets Power
It is impossible and wrong, in this fascinating exhibition on Russian art between 1917-1932, to separate art from politics, utopian propaganda from dystopian tragedy. Aesthetic judgement is inevitably compromised. Some may think it obscene to celebrate this period in Russian art: yet it is surely right to make us confront it, to see the boldness of the art and to try and fathom the mixed motives, the hopes and fears and struggles of the artists involved. Right too, when the headlines are full of Trump and Putin, to remind us of the history. By Jenny Uglow.
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+5 +1
Carmen Herrera: Art Without Lies
The current exhibition of Herrera’s work at the Whitney Museum endeavors to rectify the American art world’s long-term neglect: it focuses on Herrera’s work from 1948-1978, from her earliest abstracts through the various stages of her artistic evolution. For audiences, the revelation over the past decade of Herrera’s bold and vital work is a glorious gift. By Claire Messud. (Dec. 29, 2016)
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+7 +1
Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?
Eric Gill was one of the great British artists of the 20th century – and a sexual abuser of his own daughters. A new exhibition at Ditchling asks: how far should an artist’s life affect our judgment of their work? By Rachel Cooke. (Apr. 9, 2017)
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+20 +1
No Fluff in Their Stuff: Museum Guards Review the Whitney Biennial
It’s time to take the cork out of these untapped geysers of art criticism and let them gush! By Xavier Aaronson. (Apr 5, 2012)
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+19 +1
The Puzzle of Irving Penn
“I’m a surprisingly limited photographer,” Penn insisted to me, “and I’ve learned not to go beyond my capacity. I’ve tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I’ve failed.” Yet it is difficult to deny that Penn was the supreme studio photographer of the twentieth century. His artistry both emerged from and depended on his very specific, highly aestheticized commercial work. By Martin Filler.
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+16 +1
Secrets Of The Sea
A Tang Shipwreck & Early Trade In Asia. By Kristin Nord.
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+25 +1
Salvation Mode
Visually mesmerizing, intellectually engaging, and nearly decommodified, screensavers reveled in a stillness and rapture that’s gone missing in technology. By Zack Hatfield.
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+14 +1
Saul Steinberg’s View of the World
As a cartoonist myself, I am dismayed that there’s little of Saul Steinberg’s that I can steal, the crossover in the Venn diagram of the image-as-itself versus as-what-it-represents being depressingly slim. I am painfully aware that in comics, stories generally kill the image. But Steinberg’s images grow and even live on the page; somewhere in the viewing of a Steinberg drawing the reader follows not only his line, but also his line of thought. By Chris Ware.
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+22 +1
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits
The British-Ghanaian artist creates compelling character studies of people who don’t exist, reflecting her twin talents as a writer and a painter. By Zadie Smith.
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