In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967).

Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .

“…the triptych painfully reminds us that the form today signifies a broken totality that can only be unified, at best, by an act of artistic creation.”

As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics

It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.

Harris Wheless reviews Damion Searls’ new translation of André Gide’s “Marshlands.”

Suzy V reviews Yesiyu Zhao's show "Journey to the West” at David Castillo Gallery in Miami.

Is interactivity really the same freedom that art is supposed to help us access?

Charles Ray is unquestionably one of the most powerful and challenging sculptors alive. His recent works presented at the Met carry within them a subtle and expansive understanding of space, a boundless wit and delicacy, and a deep sense of history.

…the paintings’ true value resides in mediation as a process of transformation: in their voracity, boldness, and tact in transforming the original film stills.

JC Holburn reviews Paul Schrader’s film The Card Counter

If society no longer reliably yields a consistent aesthetic framework, and if even the immediate sensations of our own minds can no longer be trusted, how can we hope to reach the inner truth of an artwork?

maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.

It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another.

They’re explicit pictures, and in a world so entirely scrubbed clean of transgression, any sense of naughtiness is its own form of pleasure. Dainty feet and hands poke out in flirty little kicks, one appendage in front of the trompe l'œil frame, the other receding behind. The effect is not unlike a peep show.

It’s not true that the world is ending — if anything, it already has. And yet life continues, alive in its death. These thoughts — speculations — give a perfunctory account of the work of the late painter and poet Manoucher Yektai, a member of the New York School whose first solo show in the city since 1984 opened at Karma two weeks ago.

It was a time of mass shootings, Paris Hilton, boys playing games that looked like war on their consoles and soldiers waging war that looked like video games from drone centers.