Art

The bodhisattva was so overwhelmed by the suffering in the universe that the deity’s head split into eleven pieces.

Eleven years sober and another year older.

Why does the wind leave us feeling so exhausted and harassed?

After all these years, how well do I know her taste? How well does she know mine?

I've been stuck on the last 20% of a story I'm writing about a haunted frequency, so I went to the museum to shake some ideas loose.

A floppy-eared dog gnawed a bone while a clown smiled above the bed.

I still find myself stopping in the street, stunned by how low the clouds hang on this island.

Clear skies and a high near sixty degrees. The sun goes down at 6:11pm, the moon is full, and I can’t stop thinking about this 11-year-old I met the other day. “I’m interested in old stuff,” she said. “Everything seemed better a long time ago, like in

London. A damp weekend of clouds and mist. The sun goes down at 5:51pm and the moon is waxing. Yesterday I saw the birthplace of William Blake, now a strip of concrete between an Indian restaurant and an expensive handbag store. C. and I stepped out of the drizzle

A sunny Wednesday morning with highs in the 50s, the sun goes down at 5:30pm, and I’m recovering from an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s animal paintings at the Royal Academy. The introduction on the wall said his paintings speak to “our current predicament”—an elastic phrase that

Maybe it's limbic and hardwired, this desire to see the divine rather than hear or touch.

There are over a thousand responses from visitors now, far more than we anticipated at this point.

New York City. Sunset: 6:30pm. A new moon. Heavy clouds and damp air, a high of 66 and a low of 57 degrees. My father would have turned 73 today, and I still do not know how to mark days like this, which I suppose is why I work

I’m attempting to read Gustav Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, his 1874 depiction of the saint’s struggle with vice and distraction while searching for salvation in the Egyptian desert two thousand years ago. Flaubert’s account inspired one of my favorite artists, Odilon Redon, whose eerie

For my birthday, C. gave me the most magnificent gift: a small framed reproduction of my favorite painting, Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome in His Study from 1605. Saint Jerome was often depicted in the desert wilderness, forsaking worldly distraction in exchange for salvation. But in Caravaggio’s hands, he is

I’m reading P.D. James’s Children of Men, and the novel is a remarkably different animal from the film, particularly in how it so richly grapples with faith. In a childless world where humanity quietly fades away, the protagonist tours Europe’s museums. James’s description of the

This morning I wandered through the museum with reverberated gloom in my headphones. I wanted to visit my favorite statues and paintings before things begin closing again. The galleries were mostly empty and I felt a little shady, wearing a mask while my footsteps reverberated through the silent halls of

Saturday afternoon at the museum. 25% capacity, masks, and decals on the floor reminded us to keep our distance.

Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor.

Flipping through an old notebook last night, I came across a page dedicated to the first time I saw a painting by Hubert Robert. Such beautiful cadence in that name: Hubert Robert. Say it out loud and you can’t help but smile. I remember walking through a gallery at

A world so quickly and thoroughly changed. I find myself frequently returning to a century-old line from The Surrealist Manifesto: “Let yourself be carried along. Events will not tolerate your interference.” In the wake of the world’s first mechanized war, the Dada movement ferociously rejected institutional logic before fading

The coronavirus continues to spread. Classes have been canceled and events are postponed. One thousand cases in America now and our government doesn’t seem to care. I wash my hands, keep my distance, and show up where I’m supposed to be. The subway seems a little emptier each

Went to an exhibition about the countryside that felt like walking into a Wikipedia entry written under the influence of heavy-duty stimulants. A robotic Josef Stalin meandered through the gallery, a reminder that nothing matters anymore. The paranoia of arch-conservatives mingled with snapshots of Slab City, Arcosanti, the Shakers, Buckminster

Visited the annual Armory Show at Piers 90 and 94. Ticket prices were outrageous but I managed to slip inside with somebody else’s credentials. The brittle energy of coronavirus anxiety commingled with ritualized decadence. Face masks and champagne stations. New York declared a state of emergency this morning, yet

New York. Cold today, the kind of cold that has people cursing in the streets. It’s the first day in weeks that’s felt like winter. Ducked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit one of my favorite sculptures on Valentine’s Day: Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms

At the Rijksmuseum, a crowd gathered in front of a plexiglass box to photograph a robot scanning the fading canvas of a Rembrandt. A glimpse of the future. Looking at the tiny figures chatting and fishing in the shadows of moss-covered arches in Claude Lorrain’s Harbor at Sunrise from

I was shaken by Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits at the Finnish National Gallery. Taken as a series, these paintings grapple with mortality, isolation, and disappearance. They do not flinch. In the last two years of her life, Schjerfbeck painted twenty pictures of herself, each one progressively warped and blurred until

Published in Moscow in 1918, this short manifesto first thrilled me as an undergraduate student when I began drifting from my studies in film towards graphic design: Comrades and citizens, we, the leaders of Russian futurism–the revolutionary art of youth–declare: 1. From this day forward, with the abolition