The Important Choice of Law Questions Lurking in Tomorrow's Stolen-Pissarro...
Tomorrow the Supreme Court is supposed to hear argument in Cassirer v. Thyssen Bornemisza Collection Foundation. The facts are a somewhat dramatic story of a Pissarro painting looted by the Nazis that...
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Free the Art! Sell the Art!
Deaccession is a classic euphemism. When I first heard it, I assumed it was a parody of bureaucracy-speak or a flimsy attempt at linguistic camouflage, like getting a break-up note that says, "I'm not...
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Ross Ulbricht's First Nonfungible Token
In December, over 1,000 crypto investors who together comprise FreeRossDAO pooled their money to buy Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht's first-ever nonfungible token (NFT) for 1,446 ether, worth $6.3...
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Artist Tom Sachs: 'Apple Could Never Make Anything as Shitty as the Things I...
Do you want to build a rocket ship but don't have the deep pockets of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson? You might want to turn to the Rocket Factory, "a trans-dimensional manufacturing...
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Tom Sachs: Taking NFTs Where No Man Has Gone Before
Do you want to build a rocket ship but don't have the deep pockets of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson? You might want to turn to the Rocket Factory, "a trans-dimensional manufacturing...
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Brickbat: Candygram
In 1986, Bill Heine installed a sculpture of a 25-foot shark crashing through the roof of his home in Oxford, England, to make an anti-war, anti-nuclear statement. He did it without getting the...
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Art Curator Accuses Princeton University of 'Anti-Intellectual Surrender to...
Last December, Princeton University was slated to host an exhibition of 19th-century Jewish American artwork provided by Leonard Milberg, a Princeton alum and patron of the arts. Milberg pulled out,...
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Why Did Pandemic Authorities Treat Tattoo Shops Like Titty Bars?
"There's a huge libertarian streak that runs through the tattooing community," says Paul Smith, who co-owns Red Stag Tattoo in Austin, Texas. "Tattoos are a way of claiming yourself and putting images...
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Agnieszka Pilat: 'I Didn't Realize People Still Think Socialism Is a Good Idea.'
What sorts of paintings will be hanging in the museums of the future? Agnieszka Pilat is betting that we'll be looking at what she calls "heroic portraits of machines"—fine-art renderings of the...
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Zap Comix Were Never for Kids
In 1969, in an atmosphere of simmering animus toward youth culture, an undercover agent from the New York Police Department's Public Morals Squad visited two bookstores to buy copies of Zap No. 4....
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Landmark Shark Attack
In 1986, Bill Heine installed a sculpture of a 25-foot shark crashing through the roof of his home in Oxford, England, without getting the approval of local planning officials. His son, Magnus...
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The Dirty Pictures That Revolutionized Art
Starting in the 1960s, a maverick band of young cartoonists like Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Gilbert Shelton starting churning out comic books the likes of which had never seen...
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Brian Doherty: From MAD Magazine to Maus
Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix, by Reason...
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The Ballad of Rachel Maddow, Eddie Chiles, and J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs
Next week, Alex Wagner takes over the MSNBC slot once held by Rachel Maddow, who now broadcasts only on Monday evenings. (Wagner will handle the other four nights of the week.) Let's mark the occasion...
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Artificial Intelligence Will Change Jobs—For the Better
The ramifications of advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) are being felt further afield than anyone expected. A.I. perhaps entered the public consciousness in the 1990s thanks to chess...
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Should Free-Speech Absolutists Defend Vandalism of Precious Artwork?
A couple of climate activists caused global outrage by throwing soup at Vincent van Gogh's painting Sunflowers. Should free-speech absolutists join in? While other forms of peaceful protest are...
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Growing Up Underground With Steven Heller
As a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, Steven Heller improbably became the art director of pioneering alternative publications such as The New York Free Press, Screw...
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Steven Heller: Growing Up Underground
As a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, Steven Heller improbably became the art director of pioneering alternative publications such as The New York Free Press, the pioneering...
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Farewell to the Mother of Modern Feminist Cartooning
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, a great and trailblazing cartoonist, died this week in her home in France at age 74 from pancreatic cancer. Kominsky-Crumb grew up in Long Island, and the agonies and...
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New Movie Lists Honor Jeanne Dielman and 2001, Snub TikTok
Sight and Sound magazine has again issued two lists of the allegedly greatest films ever made—one lineup based on a poll of critics, the other on a poll of directors. At a time when movie listicles...
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