Judge – or Let the Market Be the Judge
Michael W. Clune argues that a popular mantra about art – everyone’s judgment is equal – impedes our ability to imagine a world outside of the capitalist marketplace.
Culture
Oscar Wilde Envisions Our Post-Pandemic Socialist Future
Millennials and GenZ had time to contemplate the real harms wrought by capitalism during the pandemic shutdown. Perhaps they might read Oscar Wilde, now.
‘Beirut 2020’ Portends What Awaits America
Majdalani’s Beirut 2020 warns that unwillingness to enforce rules and due process lies at the heart of the problems plaguing both Lebanon and America.
Culture/Events/Fashion/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Galleries/History/PopMatters Picks/Visual Arts
‘The New Woman Behind the Camera’ Exhibit Celebrates a Gaze of Her Own
The New Woman Behind the Camera, an exhibition of midcentury women photographers, captures the ways they documented a changing world and reimagined their place within it.
Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’ Is a Many-Headed Musical-Political Animal
Robert Altman’s Nashville is sour and sympathetic, accurate and exaggerated, messy and beady-eyed, a sprawling canvas reminiscent of Bosch or Breugel.
When the Gravestone Speaks Who Listens?
A cemetery tour guide digs into Michael Griffith’s The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell.
Black Vinyl: Confessions of a Music Collector
When I touched a copy of the Beatles’ Rarities from the odd, older man’s box of records, the hair stood on the back of my neck. These are the tales of a record collector.
‘All the Streets Are Silent’ Celebrates the Cross-Fertilization of Hip-Hop and Skateboarding in Pre-Gentrification New York
Elkin’s All the Streets Are Silent shows how skate crews and rappers picked up the mantle of guerrilla art and commerce in the post-Warhol and Basquiat years.
AIDS Activism and Sarah Schulman’s Joyous Anger
Schulman’s Let the Record Show argues that AIDS continues to kill queer, drug-addicted, brown, black, undocumented, and uninsured people.
The Exoticized Gaze in Lawrence Durrell’s ‘The Alexandra Quartet’
Durrell’s unquestioned assumption of superior European culture paradoxically allows him to be keenly responsive to Alexandria’s multinational mix.