Issue 2
Fall 2015

Art history itself was born out of a love of Greece, and in 2015, at last and electrically, the art world started to exhibit a belated resurgence of philhellenism. “Whatever happens, I want to die a Greek,” said Chateaubriand. We know the feeling.

Editor's letter Issue sold out

Essays

The Sandstorm

by Kanishk Tharoor

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, opening next year, stands to upend everything we know about museums, and about democracy. Who is it for?

Life Study

by Sam Thorne

Seven of the ten most expensive degrees in the United States are in arts subjects. Black Mountain has given way to manufactories of debt — but art school is at last being reimagined

And Now the Final Frame

by Moira Weigel

The new documentary on Amy Winehouse includes footage in formats we’ve already forgotten: home videos, camcorder candids. Life and death in the last year before Instagram

Interviews

Elizabeth Diller

“I think it was a kind of lightning rod for so many anxieties about the power of MoMA. I can’t say that I’m on the side of the developers. I’m on the side of the preservationists and the architectural community when it comes to saving buildings. And we do our best to try to do that, and sometimes it just can’t be.”

Agnieszka Kurant

“There’s a huge naïveté prevailing in the cultural field. The whole idea that somebody declares that they ‘do not participate in the art market system’ and that they can ‘refuse’ is a fiction. Because artists are always creating social capital around their work, and different artists do it in very different ways.”

Reviews

I. Los Angeles

by Travis Diehl

Athens, then. Ancient Greek bronzes come to Malibu in droves. Rachel Harrison and Matthew Barney are skeptical inheritors of an Attic apotheosis

II. Athens and Thessaloniki

by Marina Fokidis

Athens, now. At ground zero of a European catastrophe, the future seems a vacuum. But artists are regaining their footing in a city with no room for dreams

III. Tokyo and its Environs

by Andrew Maerkle

Seventy years ago Japan surrendered. The legacy of empire and militarism has reemerged at a museum on the Izu Peninsula, and in the prime minister’s office

New York and the Hamptons

by Zoë Lescaze

Sarah Charlesworth and Andreas Gursky looked through their lenses and saw very different worlds. The legacy of the Pictures Generation and Düsseldorf school in a smartphone age

Negatives

Black Squares

by Philip Tinari

In both William Kentridge’s animations and David Diao’s paintings, the promise of Russian modernism crashes against the present. And China’s censorship bureau has got some notes to share

Classic Fit

by Philipp Ekardt

Once Calvin Klein promised a return to basics. The photographer Collier Schorr, in her portrait of a model stripped to his white CK briefs, has got them beat

Picture for Women

by Iona Whittaker

The ornery art of Robert Seydel, and the unlikely sorority — Marcel Duchamp, Grayson Perry, J.M. Coetzee — of male artists’ female alter egos

Issue 2Fall 2015