Visual Arts

Visual Arts Review: Ansel Adams — Water as Motion and Time

July 20, 2012
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By using water as a lens to explore Ansel Adams’s artistry, this exhibition makes his fascination with motion and time crystal clear.

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Visual Arts Feature: Rembrandt, Rubens, the Beau Sancy, and the Jew

May 22, 2012
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The history of the Beau Sancy took me back to the years around 1640, when it passed into and out of the orbit of the greatest Netherlandish artists of the day, the Dutchman Rembrandt and the Brabander Rubens.

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Book Review: Hey Look Me Over — “Just My Type”

May 16, 2012
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Simon Garfield’s tour of fonts, Just My Type, is a rollicking, sometimes snarky social history of the design decisions behind lettering from Gutenberg to the iPad.

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Coming Attractions: Jazz Week 2012 Update

May 2, 2012
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Swarms in the train station! Improv in the library! Video game hits and poetry! Must be Jazz Week–and there’s plenty more, including a major CD release by Argentinian bassist Fernando Huergo paying tribute to the land of the Albiceleste.

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“Anti-Entropy and Uncle Order”: A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Sixth Norton Lectures

April 27, 2012
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Over the past 6 weeks William Kentridge has shown the form of the lecture itself to be obsolete. But over the course of his returns to the podium, he has shown us that the lecture’s fate is not so dire as he had induced us —- for seventy minutes at a stretch -— to believe.

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Visual Arts: Conservation Conundrums

April 26, 2012
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Art conservation is a very pragmatic field, full of compromises.

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Fuse Feature: “The Riddle behind the Riddle” — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Fifth Norton Lecture

April 20, 2012
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Mistranslation weaves through this lecture, for every translation is a mistranslation. But that is what makes them fruitful. As soon as we mis-hear or fail to understand, the brain constructs an instant bit of narrative to bridge the gap in understanding.

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“The Bad Backwards Walking” — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Fourth Norton Lecture

April 12, 2012
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William Kentridge spoke of the value of using a mirror to re-learn what he already knew how to do; the clear implication was that we are daily surrounded by mirror-images that we do not see for themselves but that hold the potential to alter our relationships to our tools and to our visions.

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Visual Arts Essay: Gods in the Gallery — A Visit to the Museum of Russian Icons

April 10, 2012
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If the icon is both a window into the mystical experience of the painter and a door allowing the saint to come into the believer’s world, am I, unbeliever that I am, hoping to stand in the line of sight, to see what I can intercept of this uncanny conversation?

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Fuse Feature: Vertical and Contingent — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Norton Lectures

April 6, 2012
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The decisions William Kentridge makes in his minute to-ings and fro-ings are akin to the decisions a poet makes as she works her measure over and over again.

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