picks May 11, 2018

Tony Cokes

“On Non-Visibility,” Tony Cokes’s first show here, opened just as Kanye West’s Trump tweets turned the internet upside down. Could the gallery have known what was coming? Cokes, who teaches in Brown University’s Modern Culture and Media department, has spent the last thirty years crafting films that examine contemporary Western culture’s multifarious (and often contradictory) manifestations by presenting text appropriated from theory, advertising, the news, and myriad other sources on solid-colored backgrounds. Pop songs from a wide array of genres accompany these PowerPoint-y slides, doubling

music May 08, 2018

Hey Superstar

FROM THE RECENT BROADWAY REVIVAL of the postmodern epic Cats (1981) to NBC’s live broadcast of Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) starring Chrissy Teigen’s husband as the Son of God, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is everywhere these days. The tsar of the mega-musical has long been on the mind of the British experimental musician Klein, who recently graced New York with a live performance, her first since the premiere of her musical Care at London’s ICA this past February. Care, which was in part inspired by her appreciation for Lloyd Webber’s melodramatic, melodic storytelling, gave Klein a chance to work,

picks April 02, 2018

“Inventur—Art in Germany, 1943–55”

I was taught the common myth of art’s disappearance in Germany immediately after the war and its reemergence in the early 1960s in my first-year introductory course on twentieth-century art. Lynette Roth, the curator of “Inventur—Art in Germany, 1943–55,” smacked me in the face with my own ignorance in this staggering survey of works made between the beginning of the fall of the Nazi empire and Germany’s entrance onto the world’s stage of mass consumerism. Using a loosely chronological format, “Inventur” tracks Germany’s economic recovery alongside artists’ developing access to materials—both

music March 16, 2018

Pop Is Pop

YOU MIGHT NOT BE SURPRISED to learn that there are only four degrees of separation between Jacques Derrida and Charli XCX. The father of deconstruction and the atomic pop songstress form the ends of a chain held together by A.G. Cook of PC Music and Green Gartside of Scritti Politti. Cook, who produced XCX’s late 2017 “mixtape” Pop 2, has hailed Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85 as an example of pop music taken to its “extreme,” a limit toward which he himself aspires. As evinced by its title, Pop 2, like Cupid & Psyche 85 before it, is all about popular music. Curiously though, there is no

Canada Choate