Nikita Teryoshin – Nothing Personal: The Back Office of War

War is good business for some, and misery for most everyone else. The executives of defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, people who directly profit from the outbreak and continuation of war, are incentivized to hope for its continuation rather than its cessation, because where there is war (in Yemen, Ukraine, or in […]

Lee Friedlander – Workers: The Human Clay

Workers: The Human Clay (Steidl, 2023) is the most comprehensive volume to focus on Lee Friedlander’s near seventy year fascination with work and those who do it. Edited by Joshua Chuang and bringing together 253 images stretching as far back as 1958, this book functions well as an overview of a subject that has persisted […]

Broomberg & Chanarin The Late Estate

“Something about our goodbye will always scratch like an infected nipple under a peasant’s burlap shirt. How else to carry these potatoes?”   I will freely admit that I am questioning to myself whether you are worth more to me dead or alive. Of course, this is mostly due to the uncomfortable feelings of loss […]

Sophie Calle – Because

“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb” – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. […]

Willem de Kooning: What Abstract Art Means to Me (1951)

Queen of Hearts, 1943-46 @ The Willem de Kooning Foundation “It is very interesting to notice that a lot of people who want to take the talking out of painting, for instance, do nothing else but talk about it.” – Willem de Kooning   What Abstract Art Means to Me By Willem de Kooning, February […]

How to Sue Richard Prince and Win

 Today, Richard Prince, still glowing in triumph after his own copyright battle with Patrick Cariou, is simply screen-capturing his own participation on Instagram—brazenly selling inkjet enlargements of other people’s image uploads for $90,000 a pop. What’s more, Prince is adored for it. How to Sue Richard Prince and Win By Nate Harrison, July 10, 2015 My […]

Shopping with Andy Warhol (1988)

    There was no logical reason to limit the collection, for any reasons of quantity or bulk.   Shopping with Andy By Stuart Pivar, originally published in volume five of the Sotheby’s Andy Warhol Collection 1988 auction catalogue Andy Warhol loved to buy art. We used to go shopping for it together for a […]

Notes on Five Key Jean-Michel Basquiat Works

Untitled (Head), 1981 His paintings proclaimed the existence of a more basic truth locked within a given event or thought. The Defining Years: Notes on Five Key Works By Fred Hoffman The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic Just because the body is rotten— That is all fantasy. What is found now […]

Ed Ruscha: “One-Way Street” (2005)

 Edward Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956, delivered by the car trip he and high school friend Mason Williams took in Ruscha’s black 1950 Ford from Oklahoma to the suburban-like stretch of a rapidly developing L.A.   Ed Ruscha’s One-Way Street By Jaleh Mansoor, OCTOBER, Winter 2005, pp. 127–42. Edward Ruscha arrived in Los […]