If you’re in the City, be sure not to miss Kyle Gann, author of No Such Things as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, giving a presentation for the Goethe-Institut New York, as part of their Unsound Lounge series, co-sponsored with Unsound. The event is free and open to the public. The
Ivan Lett Virginia Woolf declared in her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” that “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” There is hardly a better way to describe the dilemma of art in the Modernist period. The mere mention of Mrs.Woolf, her husband Leonard, E.M. Forster, and their
A special “Tuesday Studio” announcement: we have just added a new forthcoming title to our Spring 2011 list, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, published in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and edited by The Met’s Costume Institute curators, Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda. The tragedy of McQueen’s suicide in
Between 1917 and 1937, Alfred Stieglitz took 331 photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Along with the thousands of letters the two exchanged throughout their 30-year romance, these photographs occupy a sort of middle ground between documentation and expression, between correspondence and art. They are an eloquent testament to a profound and
While the Great Depression has been a heavily referenced subject, almost exclusively in its negative sense, it’s worth considering the aesthetic aspects of the period that appeared and endured alongside, or in spite of, worldwide economic restraints. At a time when the United States had emerged as a world power
This morning, Ken Corbett, author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, contributed to a segment on ABC’s Good Morning America called “Pageant Boys,” examining the increasing participation of young boys in beauty pageants. Corbett’s book adds to recent literature such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia on expectations
If you missed it on NPR’s All Things Considered last weekend, be sure to listen to Adam Bradley‘s brief interview on lyrics as poetry: NPR.org. NPR’s “The Record” blog also followed up with Sam Anderson after his rave review of The Anthology of Rap in New York magazine, and you
Hard to believe, but it has now been three years since the death of Norman Mailer. Mailer was one of the most important American writers in the postwar era, winning a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for the unusual nonfictional novel, The Armies of the Night, and another Pulitzer
This year the Whitney Museum of Art presents a retrospective of the American artist, Paul Thek. Seeing his wide range of work makes clear that Thek’s status as a little known artist does not befit the radicalism found in his art. The exhibition at the Whitney successfully presents the work
In the prologue to Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, historian Nicholas Phillipson acknowledges the difficulty of writing about a man who left little to write about. A fastidious author and scholar who disdained any prospect of misinterpretation, Smith had his letters, notes, and unfinished manuscripts destroyed before his death in