Art Archives

Art

Visual Tedium

by Tom Wolfe,

From “The Painted Word,” which appeared in the April 1975 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive. People don’t read…

Museum Pieces

by Jonathan Lethem,

From Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, which was published last month by ZE Books. The museums of New York in the Seventies and Eighties were as much the…

Art and Artifice

by Donna Tartt,

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. Toward the end of…

New Books

by Dan Piepenbring,

I’m a father now. Please, hold your applause. As I write this, my son is fifteen days old, and I’m staring into the soft hurricane whorl of his hair, thinking…

Everyone’s a Critic

From a list of accidental damage done to works of art since 2000, collected in Artifacts: Fascinating Facts about Art, Artists, and the Art World, which will be published this…

Stages of Grief

by William Deresiewicz,

What the pandemic has done to the arts

Slash Fictions

by Noah Sneider,

A vandalized painting and the legacy of Ivan the Terrible

Red Tape

From explanations given by the Chinese government for why certain artists and celebrities are banned from entering or performing in the country. Behaving badly in social lifeAssociating with countercultureUsing profanity…

The Lightness

by Catherine Meurisse,

A Charlie Hebdo cartoonist finds refuge from terror

Rallying Tries

From posters painted by North Korean artists and sold internationally by an Italian company.

Outside the White Box

by Mark Kingwell,

Can art make anything happen?

Art

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