Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / During and after the AIDS epidemic, gay artists like Carlos Alfonzo, Ross Bleckner, Robert Gober, and Keith Haring used visual […]
Screens
Art and Film: Dedicated followers of fashion
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In the brilliantly obtuse Phantom Thread, a paradoxically epic chamber piece, Paul Thomas Anderson explores the way in which romantic […]
Art & Film: Liquid asset in The Shape of Water
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Cult film auteur Guillermo del Toro, director and co-writer of the triumphant The Shape of Water, sees 1962, in which […]
Art and film: Billboard as political provocation
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / During the pre-Mad Men golden age of roadside America, advertising billboards set a tone of warm and friendly commercialism. Perhaps […]
Art and Film: Ruben Ostlund’s bloated indignation
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The art world and the bourgeoisie are taking a cinematic beating this year. Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and […]
Art and Film: Noah Baumbach’s New York state of mind
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is arguably Noah Baumbach’s best movie since The Squid and the Whale, and seems sure to […]
Art and Film: Aronofsky�s Bosch-esque mother!
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Albert Oehlen is perhaps foremost among visual artists seeking to capture the jangled frenzy of the Internet Age, having done […]
Art and film: Kogonada and Modernism in “Columbus”
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Columbus is a serenely penetrating postmodern film, acted with realistic understatement and set in the eponymous city in Indiana — […]
Art and film: “Detroit” and Faulkner’s truth
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That is a key truth about one […]
Film: A strategic retreat’s smirk of defiance in DUNKIRK
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In his paradoxically granular war epic Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan assumes viewers know that the British Army’s 1940 strategic retreat from […]
Art and Film: Ghost as witness
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / George Eliot said, wisely, that our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them. For the great […]
Art and film: Bruce Conner, escape artist
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Evident in the transfixing Bruce Conner retrospective �Bruce Conner: It�s All True� at MoMA is a probing eye that seeks […]
Art and film: Growing up at 70 Hester Street with Thomas Nozkowski and Joyce Robins
Contributed by Casimir Nozkowski / I grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a building that was once a synagogue, a whiskey […]
Art and Film: Robert Cenedella�s legitimacy
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Victor Kanefsky�s effervescent documentary Art Bastard casts 76-year old New York painter Robert Cenedella as a kind of aesthetic Robin […]
Art and film: David Hockney’s world
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / David Hockney, in Randall Wright’s rather breezy documentary Hockney (at Film Society of Lincoln Center, extended through June 2), appears […]
Art and Film: War and art�s uneasy survival
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Russian director Alexander Sokurov�s Francofonia is a strange and intriguing film � a kind of avant-garde point-of-view documentary. Do not […]
Art and Film: Women with dogs
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Two new films concern edgy women of the New York art scene: Lisa Immordino Vreeland�s Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict and […]
Art and Film: Painter-Spy in Bridge of Spies
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Bridge of Spies begins and ends with a painting. Steven Spielberg�s latest film is a penetrating and affecting consideration of […]
Channel surfing with Tomas Vu
I was watching House of Cards last night, Season 3, Episode 3–the one in which the coarse and cagey Russian President Petrov makes a state […]
ON FILM: Wes Anderson’s big picture
Guest Contributor Jonathan Stevenson / Art — especially painting — is an honored cinematic metaphor for culture, particularly as a symbol of civilization under siege. […]
