Anything Could Become a Battleground
Isaac Butler’s new book mixes history and personal testimony to examine the ‘culture wars’ that shaped the 1980s—conflicts that differed in striking ways from the ones we’re witnessing today.
Art & Architecture
"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." — Frank Zappa
Drowning Airplanes Give You So Much More
On Megan Mi-Ai Lee at Tiffany’s in Los Angeles.
Organizing Pessimism
André Breton, necropolitics, and 100 years of surrealism.
Glowing and Mundane
Exploring an exhibition of paintings by Fred Reichman, a Bay Area bohemian who blended modernism and Zen in works of calligraphic spareness.
Friendship as a Way of Life
Art, love, and a dense web of friendships in a double biography and richly textured history of Downtown Manhattan from the 1960s to the ’80s.
A Museum Gone to Pot
Rose B. Simpson parks lowriders inside the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
Jock, Basic, Leather, Western
Artist and critic Hal Fischer discusses his seminal photographic series ‘Gay Semiotics’ and a new career-spanning monograph.
The Academy in a State of Siege: Pictures of an Institution, Part II
The siege of the academy continues.
The Academy in a State of Siege: Pictures of an Institution, Part I
The academy has always been in a state of siege.
Being Eugène Atget
The new exhibition of Eugène Atget’s photography demands what we are getting worse at giving: time, stillness, and the willingness to see.
What’s Black About Black Art?
In a new Archive post, Richie George looks at essays by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah and Eskor David Johnson to consider double consciousness and Black expression.
The Precarious Deaths of Monuments
The afterlives of Confederate memorials and the ideological contradictions of American commemorative culture.
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