Writing in the current issue of the New Left Review, Mike Davis offers a two-part meditation on the environmental crisis. The first part, “Pessimism of the Intellect,” uses the recent announcement that we have left behind the Holocene epoch and entered an Anthropocene period, made by Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, as [...]

The January 2010 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly contains reviews of recent books by two scholars based at NYU. Both books, Thomas M. Truxes’s Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York and Bryan Waterman’s Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature, [...]

I’ve just finished reading the new issue of The Baffler, and I can report that every article rewards an attentive read. The writing is crisp and the thinking is sharp throughout the magazine. Somewhat surprisingly, the tone of simmering resentment at the follies of our political and economic mandarins is invigorating, even at a moment [...]

“The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to ‘trouble’ ideas.” So says Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, whose reviews and essays I always make a point to read when I come across them.

Many people have commented upon Tony Judt’s eloquent and acutely observant description of the “progressive imprisonment without parole” that is life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from which he suffers. The first of a series of short essays, on the subject of getting through the night, is in the January 14 issue of the NYRB. Judt [...]

e-flux journal has printed excerpts from October’s recent questionnaire about the “lightness of being” that seemingly characterizes contemporary art.

I’m jealous of my friend Michael Ned Holte, a talented art critic and film enthusiast, for he has seen James Benning’s Ruhr (2009), the filmmaker’s newest work and first foray into high-definition video. Thankfully, he has also written about it, for Artforum.com.

Those who remember with some fondness Today in Letters, the blog I published briefly in 2007, will appreciate Letters of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. The author describes it as a “blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives.” Since I began following the site a few weeks ago, [...]

From an interview with Wolves in the Throne Room drummer and organic farmer Aaron Weaver: “I think that black metal fundamentally is an attempt to reawaken an ancient spirit. It’s an attempt to touch some sort of transcendent primal knowledge…. I think that black metal is an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a [...]

On Design Observer, Steven Heller looks back at the late-’60s leftist muckracking magazine Ramparts, discussing both its content and its (curiously staid but influential) design. “Marking the end of post-war puritan American values, a younger generation that had been raised on the sour milk of McCarthyism reinvigorated periodical publishing. Ramparts on the West Coast was [...]

The first significant reviews of Gordon Wood’s entry in Oxford’s multi-volume History of the United States are trickling in. Jay Winik, in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, calls Empire of Liberty “the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing” and “as elegant a synopsis of the period as any I know,” [...]

Prompted by an article in The Guardian and an op-ed in the New York Times, Ben Davis considers why people hate “conceptual” art: “What people actually mean by ‘conceptual art’ here is art that is not valued on the basis of its real, intrinsic merits, but because of the ideas around it. ‘Conceptual’ is conflated [...]

Last night, T.J. Stiles’s new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction from an award committee chaired by Yale historian David Blight. By coincidence I just happened to read a thoughtful, generous (but by no means naive) review-essay about the book written by Steve Fraser. It’s in the [...]

The last time I wrote about Sharon Core’s photographs I reviewed an exhibition of prints from her series “Early American,” which is based on the still life compositions of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century painter Raphaelle Peale. New photographs from that series are now on view, of all places, in the Gallery at Hermès on Madison [...]

I am a fan of Marilynne Robinson’s writing, so I was happy to learn yesterday that her next book will arrive in 2010. It is an essay collection titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, and it will be released by Yale University Press. It seems likely [...]

After a lapse of about eighteen months, I’ve renewed my subscription to the London Review of Books just as the journal celebrates its thirtieth anniversary and launches a newly redesigned website. John Sutherland, a contributor for three decades, profiles the LRB and its editors for the Financial Times, recounting its “marsupial” early issues (enfolded within [...]

The program for the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, which will be held in San Diego next January, is now online. There are scores, if not hundreds, of sessions and panel discussions. Based on a cursory look through the list, one trend is particularly clear: ocean and maritime history is enjoying a [...]

Two books on which I worked as editor and/or copyeditor have just been published. The first is Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat, an anthology of essays and one interview that concerns Anton Vidokle’s artistic practice. It is the eighteenth book in the Lukas & Sternberg series from Sternberg Press. I wrote a preface for the collection; [...]

For a closer look at the actual contents of the exhibition, please see Whitney Museum curator Elisabeth Sussman’s excellent review in the November issue of Artforum.

My friend and former colleague David Velasco has interviewed Tacita Dean, one of my favorite working artists, about her new film Craneway Event, which premieres next week as part of PERFORMA 09.

To mark its tenth anniversary, Afterall magazine has launched a redesigned version of its website. It’s an exceedingly attractive design (by a company called At Work), and as part of the celebration the editors have made available the entire contents of its twenty-one previous issues. Joshua Decter’s long essay on “art and the cultural contradictions [...]

Last Wednesday I traveled to Philadelphia to see the exhibition “Dance with Camera,” on view through March 21 at the Institute of Contemporary Art. My review will arrive on newsstands several months from now, but in the meantime I wanted to share my newfound enthusiasm for Hilary Harris, a now little-known documentary filmmaker whose exquisite [...]

My brief review of Paul Goldberger’s Why Architecture Matters (Yale) appears in the fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Click here (and scroll down) to read it. “[Goldberger] is suitably temperate while discussing the balance of ‘aesthetic ambition’ and ’social purpose,’ exterior form and interior space, architecture’s effects on our emotions and on our [...]

“Thomas Chambers (1808-1869): American Marine and Landscape Painter” opened this week at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and I highly recommend a visit. (I saw the exhibition last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was curated by Kathleen A. Foster, director of that museum’s Center for American Art.) Don’t [...]

The September-October issue of Duke Magazine includes a chronicle of Kelly Kennington’s search for a tenure-track position. Kennington, a newly minted history Ph.D. whose dissertation is about slaves who sued for their freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court, prepares meticulously for the job search and is ultimately successful. The details nonetheless remain somewhat harrowing: fifty-four [...]

In recent days I’ve been listening to two albums released last spring on the venerable electronic/ambient/experimental music label 12k. Both, by coincidence, are by artists from Australia. The first is Seaworthy’s album “1897,” which was recorded in and around a century-old decommissioned ammunitions bunker. Guitarist Cameron Webb’s hesitant, wandering, layered yet clean guitar picking owes [...]

The annual Viennale festival has commissioned James Benning to create its “festival trailer,” and the resultant one-minute film, Fire & Rain, is available for viewing online. From the festival website: “Benning shot the work process in a steelworks in the Ruhr area. On a kind of conveyor belt, a glowing piece of steel flits across [...]

I’ve just begun (and am enjoying) Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal. The book has just been released in an attractive paperback edition by Yale University Press, and its back cover presents blurbs from the geographically dispersed but uniformly respected literary intellectuals Azar Nafisi, Mario Vargas Llosa, Adam Zagajewski, and Ivan Klima. The [...]

Rebecca Solnit’s new book A Paradise Built in Hell is receiving a fair amount of press attention, including reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the B&N Review, and elsewhere. Most have been positive; Christine Stanstell’s review in the current New Republic, not yet available at the magazine’s poorly redesigned website, dissents from [...]

According to an e-mail just sent to the Graduate Center community from President William P. Kelly: “I’m delighted to report that that Dr. Brenda Wineapple has agreed to join us as the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Brenda’s achievements as author, biographer, scholar, and teacher are remarkable. Her most recent book, White [...]

The September/October/November issue of Bookforum has been posted online. It contains my brief review of Cecelia Tichi’s Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us) (UNC Press). The issue’s loose theme is “Work in Progress.” As always, the pairing of reviewers and subjects is incredibly sharp, with Gregory Sholette writing about [...]

Last night I finally spotted Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press) on bookstore shelves. I’ve been curious about the anthology since the dust jacket for Marcus’s last book, The Shape of Things to Come, mentioned he was at work on it. Just how broadly would Marcus and [...]

The new season is upon us. Each August I spend some time compiling a large list of art and academic events in and around New York City, which I use and share with a few others. After sending my autumn calendar to some friends I realized that some readers of this site might enjoy it [...]

Selected articles from the September issue of Artforum have been posted to the magazine’s website (of which I am Editor at Large). I haven’t read the entire issue, but among the pieces that are available I can recommend Barry Schwabsky’s article on Richard Hell, Joshua Kit Clayton’s eccentric and sometimes funny top ten list, and [...]

Scott Burton? Who would’ve guessed that the advertising magnate–collector–dealer famous for supporting YBA artists early in their careers would wish for more minimalist chairs carved from rocks? “Forgive my tackiness, but my favourite dead-artist-who-could-have-been-a-contender was Scott Burton. He did get a bit of recognition in the late 1970s with his quirky take on furniture as [...]

The summer issue of Canadian Art features a cover story on artist Mark Lewis, a very talented filmmaker who is currently representing Canada at the Venice Biennale. “Lewis works with film as if it were a sculptural material,” writes Nancy Tousley. “He demonstrates its inherent difference from other kinds of picture-making and shows how it [...]