Critics At Large

Portrait of Louisa May Alcott by Lance Austin Olsen. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship. Far away in the suns...

“Art never saved the world. It cannot do so.” --Marcel Duchamp “Everyone is an artist.” --Joseph Beuys The 20th century. Oh how I do miss th...

(Princeton University Press.) “I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, just recording not thinking. Recording. Some day all thi...

The Dostoyevsky: Man is a Mystery exhibit at the Muxin Art Museum. (Photo: Jason Wang.) To reach the Muxin Art Museum, one first passes thr...

(Bloomsbury Books.) “Objects have the longest memories of all. Beneath their stillness, they are alive with all the experiences they have ev...

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press) “Books are the mirrors of the soul. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot te...

(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.) “Censorship is the mother of all metaphor.” Jorge Luis Borges It’s always heartening to encou...

(Zone Books, Princeton University Press.) “Unframedness. Presentness. Immediateness. It is under these three titles — intimately related — t...

(Bloomsbury Books.) “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.” ...

Princeton University Press. “Here. A place in the world. Proof that one exists. Barnett Newman spent a lifetime searching for confirmation o...

I. Talking Skin:  Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink (Princeton University Press.) “For thousands of years, these c...

Reaktion Books/Univeristy of Chicago Press “Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said, during a certain period.”  Wyndham Lew...

(Bloomsbury.) “We know that hyperbole is first of all a rhetorical figure of exaggeration but it is more fundamentally a moment of hubris. H...

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press.) “An element, we take it, is a body into which other bodies may be analyzed, present in them p...

André Breton claimed with these glasses he could see the future. He was right. (Photo: InLibris.) “How very hard to run a movement and be on...

(University of Texas Press.)                                   (Duke University Press.) “What remains to be said about an absence that canno...

(McGill/Queen's University Press.) “Much we long for what we lack, for what is closed within the grave, our treasure and triumph, our gl...

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.”                              -- Franz Kafka (to Max B...

(New Directions.) “It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.” --Kenzaburo Oe Yoko Tawada’s beau...

“1966 was the high point of British pop art, and with hits like The Yardbirds’ 'Shapes of Things,' there was an incredible compressi...