Jenny Holzer works in words. Her art flows from the endless river of language that surrounds us. She dips her hands into that river and pulls out a tiny handful for us to look into and reflect. For most of her career, she’s distilled these little draughts into “truisms” such as “Don't place too ...

Monday, June 12th, is judgment day for Yuri Samodurov, former director of Moscow’s Sakharov Museum, and Andrei Yerofeyev, a former curator of the Tretyakov Gallery. They face the possibility of three years of jail time for violating Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code, which prohibits ...

Growing up, I spent many a rainy or wintry Saturday afternoon watching classic old horror films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or Dracula Vs. Frankenstein. It always seemed that one monster inevitably ran into another. Modern museum blockbuster exhibitions often have the same feel as they ...

“Pure energy,” intoned Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in the classic Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy." (In 1988, Information Society immortalized the phrase when they sampled it into their synthpop hit, “What’s On Your Mind.”) Actor, director, author, poet, philanthropist, photographer—Nimoy brings ...

When I was a kid, I found myself glued to the television whenever a moon landing took place. Even when others grew jaded by repeated landings, I never lost sight of the rarity of the event. Just as rare is the opportunity to view rarely exhibited, light-sensitive works on silk and paper by Chinese ...

Leave it to a comic book icon to cause a flag-related stir as the 4th of July weekend approaches. Wonder Woman, everyone’s favorite 69-year-old Amazon, celebrated the 600th issue of her signature comic book with a whole new look that leaves the red, white, and blue behind (shown). Feminists, or at ...

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then John Scarlett Davis must have been the sincerest flatterer in all of England in 1829.  In the exhibition Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London , the Yale Center for British Art solves the “puzzle” of Davis’s painting The ...

“It’s time we Met,” reads several posters in the latest marketing campaign of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  A recent piece by Peter Aspden titled “Met on the Move” in the Financial Times queried the Met’s director Thomas P. Campbell (shown) as to what new directions the museum ...

Half a million people die annually in the United States from substance abuse or addiction, which represents 1 in 5 deaths overall. One-half trillion dollars are lost annually in the battle against abuse and addiction. Faced with those numbers, medical science recognizes that science itself may not ...

Ever since Lafayette, some connection between America and France, however tenuous, has existed. One of the strongest bonds between the two countries is the American love of French art. When we think of French art today, we instantly imagine the Impressionists. Our National Gallery of Art, in ...

Thanks to years of conservative pushback, the United States Census looks like a huge waste of time and taxpayer money to many Americans.  Even worse, many Americans misconceive the census as the government’s insidious way of metaphorically looking through their keyhole to spy into their private ...

This summer at The Phillips Collection there’s a different kind of colorblindness going on. White is the “new black,” or at least the color telling the most interesting stories in Pousette-Dart: Predominantly White Paintings and Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations , both of which run through ...

Any art lover who has been to Paris knows what it’s like to try to see everything in a finite time frame. Cruel choices must be made, masterpieces must be missed, and croissant or two wolfed down in the name of maximizing viewing. If only the great museums of Paris could somehow travel the world ...

Everyone loves labels. Italian Renaissance, French Baroque, Classical Greek—such little conveniences help us understand and comprehend the often tangled and messy reality of artists and art movements, which, like any living thing, are always more complex and fascinating than any label can express. ...

Walking through the Late Renoir exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently, I couldn’t help but be struck by the power of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings of his three sons—Pierre, Jean, and Claude.  Renoir didn’t begin having children until he reached his fifties, but he doted on them ...