The New Republic

Rarely have life’s sweetness and bitterness been embraced with more evenhanded genius than in the work of Jacques Callot. The seventeenth-century French printmaker finds an ethics of vision—a way of grappling with whatever the world has to offer—in the indomitable force and lucidity of his line. READ MORE >>

Everybody enjoys watching a David and Goliath story unfold. So it is not a surprise that a cultural controversy starring the Museum of Modern Art as a rapacious Goliath has become national news. The kickoff was MoMA’s announcement a few weeks ago that as part of its continuing expansion on West 53rd Street it planned to tear down the former American Folk Art Museum, which was designed by the firm of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and only opened a dozen years ago. READ MORE >>

Frieze New York, up and running through Monday, is a fashionista’s wet dream of what an art fair ought to be. Take a look if you want to know how the people who buy and sell contemporary paintings and whatnots are amusing themselves right now. Set in a meandering white tent on Randall’s Island in the East River—it’s just a quick taxi ride (or Frieze-organized bus or ferry ride) from Manhattan—Frieze New York is our Gilded Age art world’s answer to the perfect Edwardian country house party. The bleached-chic style can make ignorance and mendacity look pretty. READ MORE >>

Let this be fair warning: You will not see Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, that most recklessly zany of all Pop Art creations, in the exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store.” This is not exactly through any fault of Ann Temkin, the curator in charge. READ MORE >>

It did not take long, after the attacks at the finish line of the Boston marathon, for images of the carnage to start rocketing around the web. The stills and the video footage streamed across our screens even before the police or the local government could confirm what had happened. Every event is a font of images now, every bystander a photographer. READ MORE >>

Art collectors keep getting richer, and galleries keep getting bigger, and the arts-loving public is paying less and less attention. “Chelsea galleries used to hum with activity,” the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote last month. READ MORE >>

The rapture that has greeted “Piero della Francesca in America,” at the Frick Collection, is a bit much. Reactions to this unquestionably beautiful gathering of seven paintings by the fifteenth-century Italian master are so hushed and reverent that I find myself wondering if people are transfixed by the paintings or by their participation in what has been widely recognized as this season’s perfect little museum show. Don’t get me wrong. I have no wish to be a killjoy. READ MORE >>

There she lies: a woman stretched out on a white mattress, encoffined in glass like Vladimir Lenin. Yet despite the deathly pallor of her skin Tilda Swinton is only asleep, or pretending to be. She’s fully dressed, in a plaid button-down shirt and jeans, with grimy sneakers on her feet. READ MORE >>

For biographers, who give a person’s life a second life by putting it between covers, the ever-diminishing shelf life of books has to have a particular poignancy. It was only the day before yesterday that new biographies of three artists of our time appeared, and yet those lives of David Hockney, Saul Steinberg, and David Wojnarowicz, each of which has been received with generosity and attentiveness, are already off the stage. READ MORE >>

When I’m bored, or when I’m supposed to be working, I can slip into a kind of codependency with my phone. I will instantly, unthinkingly click on anything new, just to distract myself. So it was on a slow Friday a few weeks ago when my phone buzzed with a push notification from Twitter. “Why hello @reidcherlin,” it said, followed by a link. I put my thumb to screen, and suddenly I was staring at my own face—a pencil-drawn likeness of a very old and gaunt version of myself, there on my iPhone. READ MORE >>