Issue 8
Fall 2017

Like Rilke at the Louvre, Liu Xiaobo at the Met had an encounter with art that took the form of a moral command: you must change your life. Within a month he’d bought a one-way ticket back to Beijing, to Tiananmen, and to a new destiny.
Editor’s letter Buy issue

Essays

No Enemies

by Jacob Dreyer

June 4, 1989, changed China — and art history — forever. The dissident, the hipster, the eyewitness, the institutionalist: four paths onward from Tiananmen Square

The Other Side of the Tracks

by Jacob Moore

Just north of Chelsea’s galleries is the largest private real estate development in US history. Who is Hudson Yards for — and is anyone paying attention?

House of Treasures

by Max Nelson

Wonderstruck, Todd Haynes’s kid-friendly new film, rambles through the Natural History Museum. As in all his melodramas, everything hinges on the rules of display

Negatives

The Season Finale

Bronze and wood dominate the furnishings; white and blonde are the primary hair colors. A visit to the modernist ruins of the Four Seasons, where the premixed martinis are not the only offense
by Kyle Chayka

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Interviews

Camille Henrot

“Most people who express opinions online only want to convince other people — whereas the person who doesn’t know, who’s reflecting, that’s the voice you want to hear the most! ‘I’ve been ruminating over this for a while, I’m really unsure of what to say…’. Nobody ever says that online!”

Liz Glynn

“The Getty Villa is paradise, but it’s also utterly fake. When I came to California, none of the materials that I would find on the side of the road were anything but garbage, really. Performance became a way to invest those objects with a history.”

Negatives

Scandal Sheet

by Suzy Hansen

Turkey’s best newspaper goes on trial. The prosecution of Cumhuriyet, and its star journalist Ahmet Şık, is just the latest chapter in a long, sordid story

The Old Curiosity Shop

by Lauren Elkin

Adieu, Colette; adieu, the 90s. Paris’s quirkiest concept store, shutting its doors this year, was heir to a tradition that Balzac would have recognized

Stand Clear

by Michael Kinnucan

This train runs local to the ninth circle. New York’s subway system is falling apart; what happens to a city this rich and safe when its infrastructure finally rots?

The Semiconductor

by Deirdre Loughridge

As Venezuela rumbles, LA’s maestro goes silent. Gustavo Dudamel says music is apolitical, but orchestras are dictatorships in their own way

Portfolio

The art of Li Ran: image of the people