Art
As Russians Steal Ukraine’s Art, They Attack Its Identity, Too
KHERSON, Ukraine — One morning in late October, Russian forces blocked off a street in downtown Kherson and surrounded a graceful old building with dozens of soldiers. Five large trucks pulled up. So did a line of military vehicles, ferrying Russian agents who filed in through several doors. It was a carefully planned, highly organized, […]
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Turning Trash Into Poetry
PARIS — Compared with the junk she’s found in other cities, “Parisian trash is sturdy,” Ser Serpas said. She speaks from experience — at 27, the itinerant artist and poet is admired in European and North American art circles for precariously poised arrangements of urban discards found near the venues where they’re shown. They become […]
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Book Review: ‘Forbidden Notebook,’ by Alba de Céspedes
By the 1950s, she was known throughout Italy. For years she wrote a popular advice column, tackling questions about marriage, infidelity and love with meditations on art and philosophy. These columns steered readers toward a modern, more secular morality, one that stressed women’s equality. Her private life was the stuff of rumors — according to […]
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In Hale County, Alabama, Two Visions of Place
Hale County, Ala., holds a special position in American visual culture. This is where Walker Evans made his photographs of white sharecropper families for “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” with James Agee’s text, a core document of Depression-era poverty. It is where William Christenberry, who grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa with roots in the […]
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AI’s Best Trick Yet Is Showering Us With Attention
One thing about inhabiting a face is that we can never quite see it the way others do. Mirrors give us a reversed image. Photographs freeze us in time at odd angles and, sometimes, in pitiless detail. Staring into a phone camera, preening to check our makeup or undereye circles, gives us a hyperreal mirror, […]
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Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’ Memoir Breaks Sales Records
Some critics in Britain wrote about the book in baffled tones, lobbing superlatives that were not always complimentary. A review in The Guardian called it “a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative” that is “by turns sympathetic and absurd.” A critic writing for the BBC called it “the weirdest book ever written by a royal” […]
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A Hamline Adjunct Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.
To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took […]
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Paul G. Allen’s Art at Christie’s Tops $1.5 Billion, Cracking Records
Just when it seemed the high-flying art market couldn’t soar any higher, paintings and sculptures from the collection of the Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, hit the $1.5 billion mark at Christie’s New York on Wednesday night, making it the biggest sale in auction history. The first of two Allen sales, it shattered a six-month-old […]
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AI-Generated Art Won a Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.
This year, the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition gave out prizes in all the usual categories: painting, quilting, sculpture. But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of […]
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