Art
Story Stream
Succès de Scandale August 13, 2025
When in November of 1849 Charlotte Brontë sent the gift of her second novel to the writer Harriet Martineau, she enclosed a note, writing that “Currer Bell offers a copy of Shirley to Miss Martineau’s acceptance, in acknowledgement of the pleasure an...
You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop August 13, 2025
Recently, a reader restacked my “Art in the Age of Slop” article about making art in an age dominated by both human and AI-generated slop. They expressed the feeling that it just sucks ass to be an artist in 2025. (They didn’t curse, I’m paraphrasing...
Zen and the Art of Being Jennifer Aniston August 13, 2025
To get to Jennifer Aniston’s sanctuary, you climb up, up, up, into the hills of Los Angeles. Past mansions shielded by millions of dollars in manicured privacy hedges. Past the gate an alleged stalker crashed into in May, which is now being surveille...
What Is the Great American Football Novel? August 12, 2025
Keith Gessen, the middle-aged and reasonably happy (or so I assume) literary man, once wrote an essay for the New York Times titled “In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel.” As befits a novelist, he wondered if it might not be a case of art imi...
On Meeting Strangers August 08, 2025
Somewhere on the southern edge of Greece, on the island of Rhodes, a tall man with a sunburned face and a body as if sculpted by centuries of salt and wind stood at the helm of a little, ridiculous-looking steel boat called Yellow Submarine, advertis...
The Semiotics of Girlblogging August 07, 2025
FANTASY CANNIBALIZES REALITY in Olivia Kan-Sperling’s first full-length novel, Little Pink Book, a delirious, dream-addled sojourn through the Orientalist daydreams of Limei, an introverted barista at a café in Shanghai. Limei spends her days at the ...
The Lost Art of Evil August 05, 2025
Adjacent to recent conversations and debates about the relationship between art, politics, and the canon, another rumbles just below the surface, informing and making possible the very question of a work of art’s politics or ideology....
In Defense of Laughter August 04, 2025
At the start of Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, the longtime humor columnist Dave Barry informs us that he’s writing the book in part because he wants to explain where he gets his ideas. Bei...
The Unbearable Triteness of Being Online August 04, 2025
In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus describes Irish art as “the cracked looking-glass of a servant,” and Matthew Gasda offers a cracked looking-glass for the mindscape of the terminally online in his recent novel The Sleepers....
Five Best: Books About Large Families August 04, 2025
Selected by Christopher J. Scalia, the author of ‘13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).’...
Brian Eno Wants to Know If You’re Listening August 01, 2025
Oh, no. I have lost Brian Eno.Not literally, at least. He is sitting so close that my elbow occasionally grazes his yellow corduroy sleeve, our twin rolling chairs sidled alongside a pair of broad computer screens and between two bulky brown speakers...
'WWE Unreal' Has Pissed Off Wrestling Purists August 01, 2025
How far are you willing to go to protect your job? In a bygone era of professional wrestling, an art form founded when the light bulb was a technological marvel, wrestlers were sworn to protect the business. Meaning: maintain the illusion (often refe...
'South Park' Has Lost the Plot August 01, 2025
Since 1997, South Park has satirized just about every group in modern life while hilariously positioning itself as the voice of moderation. Yet with the premier of Season 27 last week, the show seems to have lost sight of reality, instead circling th...
What Is Public Art For? June 06, 2025
The placement of a new, 12-foot-high bronze statue in Times Square, New York City’s most famous tourist and entertainment district, by the Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit organization financed by local businesses, raises the question of just what ...
The Fine Art of Bad Writing June 06, 2025
ONE OF OUR great theorists of the novel is a conceptual practitioner. Tom Comitta began as a poet who distrusted the novel, dismissed it as a commercial form. Among other experiments, they wrote intentionally bad poetry, shiterature. But then, in 201...
The Best Kind of Political Art June 06, 2025
When Dream Count was published in March, it had been twelve years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had published a novel. Her last was Americanah in 2013, and before that Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Purple Hibiscus (2003). I know because, having r...
What Do Americans Really Want to Read? June 05, 2025
The story begins in the 1990s, not long after the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of twelve new democracies. In this climate, the Soviet-born, U.S.-based artists Komar and Melamid cooked up a plan to submit art to one of democracy’s most s...
Crushing Banalities June 04, 2025
2018, Germany. A bungalow, with anthracite walls and a flat roof. Jerome Daimler’s parents purchased it. They’re divorced now. He lives there alone. The light outside is always muted, gray with little pockets of soft blue. He is constantly renting Te...
Unwinding the Gauguin Myth June 04, 2025
Sue Prideaux’s latest biography paints a vivid portrait of Paul Gauguin, the towering artist whose bright colors, flat planes, symbolism, and naked, dark-skinned Polynesian women paved the way for modernist art. She covers Gauguin’s life from his inf...
Stop All the Clocks June 04, 2025
Noah Kumin’s new novel Stop All the Clocks is released today. In anticipation of what is an intelligent and honest reflection on AI and its impact on art—a reflection that refuses to be bogged down by an increasingly reductive and political discourse...
Art and Life in the Criticism of Henry James June 02, 2025
The criticism of Henry James (1843–1916) is replete with imperiousness. We can hear this in his not altogether facetious response to Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). Deploring the undue attention Hardy pays to Gabriel Oak’s watch, Ja...
Glass Century May 23, 2025
From the BQE she caught the holy hell of it, the way smoke was streaming from burning steel. It was cinema, bad fiction, a plot point dreamed up as too ridiculous for art and discarded somewhere else. She drove on thinking that soon this would all di...
The Point of Pissing People Off May 23, 2025
Transgression trends:The artist formerly known as Kanye West is singing “Heil Hitler” onstage, and launching a “Heil Symphony,” and telling his haters to suck it;The artistic Right is reviving Italian fascist art, launching its own version of Gabriel...
The Art of the Critic May 22, 2025
“The floods of tepid soap and water which under the name of novels are being vomited forth in England, seem to me,” Henry James wrote, “to do little honour to our race.” In February 1884, 40-year-old James dismissed contemporary British novels in a l...
What’s Really Startling About the Bill Belichick Affair May 22, 2025
Bill Belichick, one of the winningest coaches in N.F.L. history, and currently the head football coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, took the title of his new book, “The Art of Winning,” from “The Art of War,” an ancient Chinese...
