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In times of it-girl inflation, everyone wants to live in a celebrity’s skin. Who better than Joan Didion to burst that bubble? Her spirit explains why style survives death and serious (prose-) stylists only buy Kim Kardashian’s shapewear.
A short history of luxury designer retrospectives – of Armani, YSL, Alexander McQueen, et al – and their more experimental counterparts illuminates 20th-century ideas of nation-building and fashion’s many possible futures.
We just love a “badass” woman-artist. The system can handle rebellion – so long as it’s one heroine at a time. Underdog stories sell, as biopics and prestige TV and gift-shop chintz, while making for easy understandings of “difficult” work. But how to break out of the mythology trap? New narrative forms must commit to putting the art first, no matter how radical the biography underneath.
In an age of burgeoning techno-feudalism, do artistic uses of kink aesthetics work as immunizations against societal violence, or do they amount to just another cope?
A painter of urban brick abandonment, Chinatown merchants, and kissing inmates, Martin Wong is having a moment, kindled by an interest in intersectional figuration twenty years after his death. Yet his images of society’s margins are as enigmatic as they are empathetic: Hot yet held back, they reflect his desire to be both one with and apart from the worlds he drifted into.
Faced with the internet’s image infinity and a market with no outside, how can an artist emerge in our oceanic right now? With eclectic sensibility and the distance of technical excellence; an ambivalence about art’s purities and vanities; a certain feline savvy around the rich; and a firmness of heart to withstand the dashing one’s hopes.
The artist’s life used to be sorted into three parts: emergent, mid-career, and established. The reality, of course, is murkier: Andy Warhol emerged from an erased past, motherhood “skipped” Louise Bourgeois’s mid-career, and Philip Guston renounced his established art – to say nothing of posthumous revisionism. How, then, can we take the measure of what an oeuvre adds up to?
The 19th-century poet, whose verse still resonates with its open-ended sense of how language produces meaning, is a model for a group of Brooklyn coders inventing a more humane computer. By Olivia Kahn-Sperling
