American artists loved abstraction until the Andy Warhols ambushed the Jackson Pollocks and started painting celebrities and Coca-Cola—or so it goes. But there is a group that, after the tumult…
Aesthetic purist, modernist architect and bitter man Adolf Loos hated ostentation. In his lecture-essay “Ornament and Crime,” he wrote, “The urge to ornament one’s face and everything within reach is…
I was shivering and a little miserable. I shook out my umbrella, heaved the Chapel door open and was greeted by a grinning man. He held his hand out for…
Did being nice kill our humor? In an interview with the Daily Beast, comedian Nick Kroll discussed comedy in the age of political correctness, saying, “I think you can still…
Every Tuesday, Joseph Whang camps out in a study room in the Art Library, the one protruding from the Main Gate, and further enlivens his drawings. His process is unchanging:…
Alumnus Peter LaBier ’03 has described his work as assemblage, as “a body of flotsam and jetsam,” “the disjointed refuse of our material culture.” Even his single-medium paintings give the…
Mark Doty’s manner is almost as lively as his poetry. As he recites, he performs a series of poses: clutching the podium with both hands, balling his fists, crossing his…
In the neighborhood Shimokitazawa in the Setagaya Ward of Tokyo, there is a Y-junction, the confluence of two narrow streets, with a little Shinto shrine. Despite the surrounding streetlights, solitary…
When a man threatened the exhibition with a container of gasoline, I felt the flames; when the mayor of Nagoya condemned the sculpture, my cheeks burned with anger. I saw…
Nobukatsu Fujioka is a bespectacled and neat-looking man. He is also a purveyor of Japan’s history wars. As a graduate student at Sophia University in Tokyo, Miki Dezaki interviewed Nobukatsu…
