Nancy Burson’s 1983 work “Big Brother,” in which she composited the faces of Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, and Ruhollah Khomeini. Courtesy the artist and Heft Gallery At first glance, Nancy Burson’s “Quantum Entanglement” paintings appear simply as white dots washing over black canvases in clusters and waves. Some dots resemble pairs of eyes; others appear …
Ronald Bladen, Three Elements, 1965. Installation view in “Primary Structures,” at the Jewish Museum, New York, April 27–June 12, 1966 The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, New York. Artwork copyright © 2026 The Estate of Ronald Bladen, LLC/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. On April 28, 1966, The New York Times ran a review of …
Sacha Stone, Alexander Calder with Cirque Calder (1926–31), 1929 Artwork copyright © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photograph courtesy of Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York. Few artists have altered the course of modern sculpture as profoundly as Alexander Calder (1898–1976). From the late 1920s onward, he worked both in the United States …
An Alexander Calder Retrospective in Paris Underscores His Inventiveness Read More »
Amedeo Modigliani, Reclining Nude, 1917 Private collection. Digital image: HIP/Art Resource, New York. For as long as people have made art, they have depicted something they know intimately: the nude human form. One of the oldest surviving works of art—the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf, which dates to between 24,000 and 22,000 B.C.—is a limestone figurine of …
Theaster Gates inside the exhibition, “Dave: All My Relations” at Gagosian Park & 75 in New York, with the historic work by Dave the Potter from his personal collection that he is gifting to Dave’s descendants, and seated on a new sculpture he made by pulverizing some forty-five of his own pots, 2026. Photo Maris …
Alfred Stieglitz, Fountain by R. Mutt, 1917, published in The Blind Man (No. 2), edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood, May 1917 Philadelphia Museum of Art When does something become a work of art? A canvas once it’s been painted? A block of marble once it’s been carved? For Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), …
What Made Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades So Revolutionary? Read More »
Marcel Duchamp with The Large Glass (1915–1923), Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1965 Mark Kauffman/Getty Images. More than any of his early modernist contemporaries, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has had a huge impact on art throughout the last century into our own. He pioneered a cerebral, ironic practice whose DNA is still apparent in works like Maurizio …
Josh Kline. Photo Isabel Asha Penzlien/©Josh Kline/Courtesy Lisson Gallery In 2011, Andrea Fraser wrote that “what has been good for the art world has been disastrous for the rest of the world.” Fifteen years on, Fraser’s words still ring true. But finding the words for why is not always so easy, and maybe that is …
How Josh Kline Wrote the Essay That the Art World Can’t Stop Talking About Read More »
Exhibition view of “New Humans: Memories of the Future” at the. New Museum, New York. Hito Steyerl’s 2025 video work “Mechanical Kurds” plays in the back. Courtesy New Museum/Photo Dario Lasagni In the beginning, there was a lot of work to do. In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Anunnaki, the Big Gods, and the Igigi, …
The New Museum’s ‘New Humans’ Reckons With Human-Machine Relations in the Workplace Read More »
Ming Wong in his studio during his residency at the National Gallery in London. ©The National Gallery In the hushed, reverent galleries of the National Gallery in London, saints usually suffer in silence. Not so in the hands of Ming Wong, who was given unparalleled access to the museum’s collection of European masterpieces during a …
Why Filmmaker Ming Wong Is the Ultimate Shape-Shifter Read More »
