Artist
Story Stream
The Fated Family March 21, 2025
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, th...
The Ecstatic Intimacies of Joe Brainard March 21, 2025
“I am a sucker for people who seem to do what they do just for you (me).” The artist and writer Joe Brainard dashed off this thought in 1969, in a letter to his friend and fellow-poet Bill Berkson. ...
The Soul Should Not Be Handled March 20, 2025
A proposition: though “trash art” remains with us, the trash artist is a dying species. Trash art is focus-grouped these days, high-gloss. Trash art is a direct-to-streaming show full of people who are slightly too attractive that’s meant to be playe...
Clout Alchemy March 17, 2025
During the summer of 2019, an English teenager named Mary-Belle Kirschner—better known as Belle Delphine—burst into the mainstream by selling small jars of “GamerGirl Bath Water” for $30 apiece. The stunt spread rapidly across social media and the pr...
The Sensitive Young Meme March 12, 2025
One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares o...
The 5 Best Albums of 2025 (So Far) March 07, 2025
The collapse of American civilization does weird things to our sense of time. The Grammy Awards were only a month ago? Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show was, too? Feels like forever. Regardless, and maybe because of those high-profile events sucking up ...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now? March 05, 2025
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theat...
Bob Dylan’s Call to Freedom March 04, 2025
Bob Dylan is, as I have previously written for Law & Liberty, America’s “definitive post-war artist.” The new James Mangold movie, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan in the first part of his career, 1961–65, proves just...
