Issue 10
Summer 2018

Art is long, life is short, goes the aphorism. That leaves out a third player: the planet lasts longest of all, and treats human life and human art with equal disregard.

Editor’s letter Buy issue

Essays

The Price of Shares

by Rob Horning

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is now something called “Newfields”: a place to frolic, eat, and take selfies. Museums cannot escape the logic of social media; dumbing down may even be a fiduciary duty

Natural Causes

by Annie Godfrey Larmon

Climate change will sear the American west; it will dry up its land art too. A high-emissions road trip to three earthworks, recast by a warming planet

Mountains Between Us

by Erica X Eisen

Conservators know just how to repair an Italian fresco; repainting them in Nepal, by contrast, is a more improvised matter. And Himalayan voluntourists may be doing more harm than good

Negatives

Beauty and the Beast

After the extreme outrage (and murder threats) that animal lovers directed at the Guggenheim last year, museums have had to rethink the ethics of art with living creatures. But are we sure that only humans have a capacity for art? Perhaps it’s time to think of the horses, monkeys, spiders, and pigs in our galleries as creators in their own right.
by Amanda Rees

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Interviews

Torbjørn Rødland

“The interesting challenge seemed to be photographing beautiful women as a straight male. Something that wasn’t allowed. But I knew that if it were possible at all, it would be because of the feminist projects I had looked at as a student. It would be because of artists like Cindy Sherman.”

Jason Moran

“I think what musicians have always thrived on is that music is immediate, and then it disappears. It might disappear into someone’s body, or into their mind, into their ear…. An exhibition is totally different. It stays, and it can be scrutinized.”

Reviews

I. Washington and New York

by Zoë Lescaze

Who gets inside a museum, and what happens once you enter? A once-in-a-lifetime exhibition in Washington bulldozes the category of “folk art” — but there’s a right way and a wrong way to expand guest lists

II. Paris

by Daniel Penny

“What’s that jacket, Margiela?” said Kanye, and a generation rushed to buy black clothes with the most discreet of labels. Two Parisian exhibitions pull back the curtain, very slightly, on a Belgian enigma

III. New York and Rio de Janeiro

by Silas Martí

Brazilian women have been the toast of American museums this season. But back home, with the first female president impeached, their rights are far from guaranteed

IV. Beirut and Sharjah

by Gökcan Demirkazık

Is it easier, in the Middle East, to break ground on a museum than make groundbreaking art? A Lebanese artist drags a generation behind him; an Egyptian turns her back on the west’s expectations

Negatives

Cinema Vérité

by Alexander Lee

Sometimes, chopping off a movie star’s nose is just the cost of doing politics. Padmaavat is the Hindu-Muslim romance that set Bollywood ablaze — but the film’s opponents have bigger goals than censorship

Writ in Water

by Wamuwi Mbao

One day everyone in Cape Town woke up to a very calm announcement: soon there would be nothing more to drink. Yet citizens of Africa’s most hedonistic city grew strangely proud of their drought

First-Person Shooter

by Kanishk Tharoor

If you believe the bushy-tailed techies, digital reproduction can make up for the ongoing destruction of cultural sites in Syria. You know who else had that idea? Hezbollah’s video game designers

Tell It to the Judge

by James McAuley

Renzo Piano, born in Genoa but a Parisian for decades, has designed a new courthouse of glass for the French capital. The lawyers are skeptical of the virtues of transparency — and so are the defendants