Carl Craig: Party/After-party

By Simon Wu

MARCH 2021 | ArtSeen

Party/After-party (2020) is the five-year lovechild of Detroit-based DJ/producer Carl Craig and curator Kelly Kivland, a sound-and-light-installation that turned the basement of the former Nabisco packaging factory into a hologram of a night club.

78. (416 East 55th Street)

By Raphael Rubinstein

NOV 2021 | The Miraculous

A painter who was a USAAF bomber pilot during the Second World War recounts to two of his poet friends how on several occasions he flew a famous movie star around North Africa. His friends don’t believe him until one day in the early 1960s when the three of them get invited to a party for the launch of a book the actress has written. The two poets are delighted because they will finally be able to prove that their painter friend simply made up his connection to the glamorous star. As they walk into the private club where the party is taking place, they espy the actress seated at a circular banquet talking with several people. She looks up as they approach and the painter makes a small hand gesture, the slightest of waves. She immediately responds with a smile and calls out to him by name and with a big “How are you?” His friends are so shocked he thinks they are may pass out.

Sounding the Idols

By W. J. T. Mitchell

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Editor's Message

Idolatry and iconoclasm are evil twins. They need each other, feed on each other. The idol is said to demand human sacrifice. The iconoclast responds by sacrificing idolaters, or (more likely) exterminating them without the dignity of sacrifice. See Exodus 32, in which Moses melts down the Golden Calf, forces the idolatrous Israelites to drink it, and massacres half his people. When Poussin paints this scene, he cannot help himself. As a painter, he must glorify the Calf and its maker, and shroud the furious Moses in darkness. Why does Aaron, the artist who made the idol, get away scot-free? Was Milton a true poet, and of the Devil’s Party?

Lifting the Ban

By Jacob Blumenfeld

JUL-AUG 2021 | Field Notes

No new demands can bridge the gap of lost meaning, no new values can patch up the moral deficit, no new party can fill the void at the center of politics, for the gap itself is now occluded by time.