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 [...]

“In contrast to the [Whitney's Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Lawrence Weiner exhibitions], each of which I walked out of having discovered an even richer and deeper oeuvre than the one I already admired, ‘Dan Graham: Beyond’ left me disillusioned,” writes Barry Schwabsky in The Nation. “Much of the exhibition feels like an anthology of [...]

Today in NYC History is a new blog from the East Village History Project. Each post contains a paragraph-long description of an event that occurred on this day in history, and the juxtapositions are entertaining. For example, the northeast blackout of 2003 is followed by the laying of the cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in [...]

Morris Dickstein’s new book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, will be on bookstore shelves in two weeks. I’m looking forward to reading it. Advance publicity is trickling out, including a long interview in Humanities, the journal of the NEH. “There are two rival clichés about the culture of the [...]

In the new issue of Frieze, theorist Sylvère Lotringer talks to Nina Power about art and the market, the failings of capitalism, and how radical thinking can help us survive “the system.” An excerpt: “Theory is not synonymous with blogging, nor is multi-tasking with thinking. The books that we publish are a long-time intellectual commitment [...]

Designer Sidney Blank created STACKD, a website that allows registered users to get in touch with other tenants in their office building, when his design company moved into a new twenty-story building on 28th Street in Manhattan. He describes the project at Urban Omnibus: “On a map, it shows which buildings belong to the network. [...]

I’m disappointed that I probably will not make it to Minneapolis to see “The Quick and the Dead,” an exhibition organized by my friend Peter Eleey for the Walker Art Center. Steven Stern reviews the exhibition in the September issue of Frieze. “At the most basic level, ‘The Quick and the Dead’, which includes 53 [...]

The literary critic, essayist, and editor Richard Poirier died last Saturday at age 83. After discovering his writing a few years ago, through a collection titled Trying It Out in America, I became enthralled, eventually reading several of his other books and purchasing a complete set of issues of Raritan, the journal he founded at [...]

Just came across the blog decasia: critique of academic culture, which is run by Eli Thorkelson, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. His subject? The anthropology of universities. There are many fascinating posts about higher education: “Against the concept of academic politics“; “Reading as an ethnographic tactic“; “The failed fantasy [...]

On August 3 the writer Luc Sante updated his blog for the first time since the beginning of the year. The post offers the story of a talkative retired cop he met one night in the 1980s at Farrell’s bar, in Brooklyn. It’s a little gem of a tale that involves Andy Warhol in unexpected [...]

Paul Collins, an entertaining journalist and historian of everything you wouldn’t expect to be recovered by historians, has published an essay in the new issue of New Scientist on moving walkways, including the novel one at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900 and an attempt a few years later to replicate it, at [...]

Aldo Buzzi, the delightful Italian essayist, turned ninety-nine yesterday. To mark the occasion, James Marcus, who has translated Buzzi’s writing, has posted an account of his visit to Buzzi’s Milan home nearly two years ago. I came to Buzzi’s writing through the enthusiasm of Patrick Kurp, who has blogged about him several times. (See here, [...]

This week the website/community Crooked Timber is holding a symposium on George Scialabba’s new essay collection What Are Intellectuals Good For? (available from Pressed Wafer). Here is the introduction; thus far contributions have come from Michael Berubé, Russell Jacoby, Aaron Swartz, Rich Yeselson, John Holbo, and Scott McLemee (who also profiled Scialabba a few years [...]

Although word about The Memory Palace has made its way around the web in recent months, I only discovered radio journalist Nate DiMeo’s new podcast over the weekend. Each three-to-six-minute episode contains an historical anecdote. DiMeo doesn’t interview historians, doesn’t cite his sources in the stories, and keeps the production values simple. (He hopes “The [...]

For those of you who check Design Observer on occasion, now would be a good time to do so: The site has just re-launched with a new design and additional content, including Change Observer and Places. The former is a blog that “looks at social innovation through the lens of design,” and includes an essay [...]