CategoryART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

In 2009 I started making poems in dialogue with the visual art and writing of Agnes Martin. I was at the beginning of what my friend the writer Miranda Mellis called a healing crisis, the most acute physical symptoms of which would last for five years. In the foreground of this healing crisis were chronic illness and pain, exacerbated by economics. Id lost a full-time teaching job to the Great...

I think artist Richard Wentworth pre-empted the idea of Instagram through his brilliant series of photographs titled Making Do and Getting By (1974 – present). A hugely influential body of work, his images document a surfeit, ‘ a creativity beyond functionality, a transformative repair.’ He has changed the way we look at the world, and stylistically a large number of diverting Instagram images...

Header image 1975, 2023 Joel Sternfeld Im no good at explaining how I came to write so much about photography, wrote an entire book about it in fact. A series of accidents, surely. Small-town western North Carolina, in the shadow of the Great Smokies, amid the Blue Ridge Mountains. My head was stuck in books, too close to the television, plunged underwater, ducked down low in the theater seats to...

To coincide with the reveals of the US and UK covers of Ingrid Robeynss Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, US cover designer Pablo Delcan and UK cover designer Jamie Keenan had a conversation via email about their design processes, the experience of working with small versus large presses, and how they unknowingly worked with the same idea to create two different but complementary...

Some people buy jewelry or pay down student debt with a book advance. Though I love Cartier as much as the next guy and Biden had yet to forgive my loans when I got my check, I bought a photograph instead. Or rather, I was the successful bidder at one of the always-anticipated sales held by Swann, the Manhattan firm whose 1952 auction was the first in America dedicated to the mysterious medium...

The Sistine Chapel frescoes are much looked upon but rarely seen. And this is not exactly because of a collective failure in those who travel from all over the world to see them. Okay, maybe you could have read a little more about the images themselves, to understand the significance of the expulsion from the garden of Eden and the depiction of Noah and the story of the flood. But you’ve come for...

I am a book lover. I have been since I was old enough to hold them and turn their pages with my own hands. Books are precious to me as worthy guides and jolly friends. I have a basement full of all sorts of them. So why have I become the sort of seemingly despicable person who regularly marks up old books with gel pens and Wite-Out so that the original text becomes largely unreadable? Why have I...

Feature image by Lynn Gilbert. Julia Bryan-Wilson is an art historian of enormous productivity, insight, range, and flair, with copious writing and curating credits, abundant laurels from diverse institutions, and generations of student acolytes. Her library to date includes Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era(University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by...

Another month of books, another month of book covers. June was full of winks, nods, and interesting framingshere are my favorites, but as ever, feel free to add on to my list in the comments below: Robert Plunket, My Search for Warren Harding; cover design by Oliver Munday (New Directions, June 6) No book cover designer makes me laugh quite as often as Oliver Munday. This is so weird and smart...

The world’s greatest living art thief is likely a 52-year-old Frenchman named Stéphane Breitwieser, who has stolen from some 200 museums, taking art worth an estimated total of $2 billion. While working on a book about him, I interviewed Breitwieser extensively, during which he discussed the details of dozens of his heists—and also expressed the brazen belief that his art crimes should be...