In March 2016, the French ambassador to Afghanistan invited Pascal Convert to the city of Bamiyan, site of the destruction of the great Buddha sculptures fifteen years earlier—six months before the attack on the Twin Towers. In deploying dynamite against these monumental statues, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar did not only desecrate religious idols, he also attacked the cultural patrimony of Afghanistan. Though Bamiyan—long a crossroads of Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Buddhism on the Silk Road—has not been a site of pilgrimage or worship for centuries, and though there are no

For the past decade, Raphaël Zarka’s work has prominently featured images of skateboarders taking advantage of the slick surfaces, hard edges, and smooth slopes of monumental public artworks. For the series “Riding Modern Art,” 2007–, Zarka, himself a skater, compiled an impressive portfolio of video clips and still photographs that show sculptures by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Richard Serra serving as improvised ramps and illicit half-pipes. Similarly irreverent, the artist’s recent exhibition, “Monte Oliveto,” also raised questions about the relationship between form and function. Commingling