Category Culture

Alex Katz’s Conversations with Friends

“Gathering” is the title of the Guggenheim’s triumphant Alex Katz retrospective (on view through Feb. 20), but it might easily have been “Conversations with Friends”—and not just because a stylish detail of a Katz double portrait graces the cover of…

Adrian Tomine’s “Fall Sweep”

Fall can be a bittersweet season. Even as we enjoy crisp air and changing leaves, the seasonally affected among us dread the shortening days. This year, there’s a long list of other anxieties: the spectre of nuclear threats from Putin,…

A Trove of Snapshots from a Sly Master of Collage

Ray Johnson, a master of the collage, made work that was cryptic, obsessive, and densely allusive. It was Pop before the style had a name; his appropriated Elvis images predate Warhol’s. But Johnson’s pieces were intimate and insinuating, not imposing,…

A Tragic History – The American Conservative

The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century, by Bedross Der Matossian, (Stanford University Press: March 2022), 360 pages. In August 1909, the Ottoman government in Istanbul replaced Zihni Paşa, the sitting Vali, or governor, of…

A Not Very Persuasive “Persuasion”

“Childhood Lover Arrives Back in Town After 8 Years.” That’s how N Recaps, a YouTube movie-summary channel, describes “Persuasion,” the new film adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, directed by Carrie Cracknell, which is now streaming on Netflix. Using narration…