Displaying items by tag: new yorker

It's official: New Yorker writer Hilton Als is the New Museum's Visionary speaker for 2015. Als will helm the annual event to be held at the museum on September 15 with the reading of a new, unpublished essay on Diane Arbus's relationship with New York City.

"Arbus is a perfect vehicle for Als's meditation," boasts a press release from the museum. "Running from privilege, she took herself further and further away from anything that could be described as normative and descended into a world teetering on the brink of the void. Like Als, she saw herself in her subjects, but, for her, life became a desperate struggle to disassociate from them."

n a piece for the New Yorker in 2000, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl asked: “Why does everybody love Sol LeWitt?” It’s a question that’s also at the heart of a new documentary about the artist that’s opening at Film Forum on May 7. LeWitt may be the chilliest member of a group of ice-cold artists associated with the male dominated first wave of minimalism, who rejected strict interpretation of their work and whose contradictions were expertly critiqued in Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, “The Flamethrowers”:

“Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself,” the main character says of her boyfriend’s work. “I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse […] and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.”