IN THE BEGINNING there was vibration: the originary pulse from which everything in the universe is shaken into being. Sound is one way vibration, that foundational matter-mover, makes sense. For the great artist-composer Camille Norment, sound is both a material essential to her practice—which arcs across sculpture, installation, drawing, music, and live performance—and a catalyst for the rearrangement, the reinvigoration, of perception, relation, and the attention we pay to the inner and outer worlds. “I believe in the sonic metaphor,” she said in a public conversation with Axel Wieder, director

IT IS NOT UNUSUAL to be moved by the ocean, stirred by frothy swells of salt water rolling onto the sand and withdrawing in perpetuity. Still, I did not expect to tear up looking at a photograph of the ocean on the second floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. Made with a medium-format camera and exhibited as an unframed, black-and-white inkjet print tacked down with paperclips, the image belongs to “Sea Never Dry,” an ongoing project begun by master photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi in 1982. The series is a sweeping record of “Bar Beach,” an iconic stretch of

IF SOCIAL ART HISTORY entails studying an artwork’s reception, few scholars have been so committed to this approach as Hannah Gadsby. Already in secondary school, at Launceston College near Tasmania’s northern coast, they developed a novel mode of discourse analysis. For an assignment, the future comedian was asked to “write about one piece of work.” They chose Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, “the painting that adorned the cover of my book about Cubism,” as they explain in their 2022 memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette. “I decided to co-opt the way that other people felt about Picasso’s ‘

SIEMON SCAMELL-KATZ is an artist who looks—as Eva Figes writes of Claude Monet adrift among his water lilies in the blue-gray hour before dawn in her 1983 novel Light—“at, not through. The bright skin of things, the shimmering envelope.” Scamell-Katz’s exquisitely colored abstract paintings on aluminum are a bit like that shimmering pond in Giverny: At first, they are subtly reflective, sensuous. They change dramatically with the angle of one’s gaze, their proximity to a window, the time of day, the weather.

Their content is determined by the landscape from which they are drawn. His palette comes

MANY ARE THE TALES of people fainting at the sight of a Vermeer, or crying just at the thought. Suzanne Raes’s new documentary, Close to Vermeer, contains several. But few could have guessed what seeing this many of the Dutch master’s paintings together in one place would feel like, and even now, at the end of the Rijksmuseum’s landmark show that made it possible, I struggle to give words to the experience. Still, I am here to offer my two guilders. As the works accumulate, the result is not gratuity or excess; their power is in no way diminished. But as you begin to learn how they tick, it

THERE ARE MANY FORKING PATHS, in life as in art, through the social and political construct that is Britain. At Tate Britain, a rehang of the biggest collection of the nation’s cultural patrimony, from the Tudor period to the present, unfolds chronologically across thirty-nine rooms. Divided by the three-hundred-foot-long Duveen Galleries (which are always devoted to temporary commissions or displays), rooms to the west, whose walls are sumptuously colored in hues of deep blue, mahogany, emerald, purple, scarlet, indigo, span from 1545 to 1940. To the east, art from 1940 to today is set against

WAS THAT REASONABLY NECESSARY? It’s a question asked every day in law schools and courthouses. Less so in MFA programs, artist studios, and museum acquisition committee meetings. Imagine counsel standing just behind Andy Warhol in the Factory, asking, “Does it need to be Brillo? What if you just did up your own soap box?” Or envision MoMA turning down a trove of Pictures generation works because legal has questions, not about provenance, but about copyright permission. We might be headed in this direction, now that the Supreme Court has injected a reasonable necessity standard into transformative

MOTHERHOOD IS TRENDING in the art world—a renaissance, if you will, not seen since . . . well, the Renaissance. Long considered a career liability for young artists and art workers, motherhood has been embraced as a topic by women who are having children at an older age, after achieving some level of professional success—as seen in recent works by Camille Henrot, Tala Madani, and Laurel Nakadate. The motif has multiplied in thematic exhibitions with such imaginative titles as “Mothering” (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2021–22), “Mother!” (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art,

IN MARCH, New York’s David Zwirner opened its first solo exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s work since the painter’s defection to the megagallery from Marian Goodman, his gallerist of thirty-seven years. The show featured fourteen of his last paintings, completed in 2016 and 2017, made before the artist, now ninety-one, declared his retirement from painting. It also contained seventy-six drawings—the products of the practice that replaced the physically arduous process of painting for Richter—and a single glass-and-steel sculpture. If one were looking for a kind of retrospective, or a coda and

THAT GLITTERING CHRISTMAS at Holy Cross Mortuary in Culver City, California, toward the end of 1999—it was the last Christmas of the twentieth century.

The cemetery is a massive site with rolling green hills and the occasional tree. Throughout the park is a patchwork quilt of flat granite or brass grave markers with the name of the rotting person beneath. Sometime before the holiday, the sprawling green pastures metamorphosed into a Winter Wonderland under the desert sun. You could see garlands in red and green, and reflective tinsel in virtually every color. There was a Santa’s workshop set up

“HERE COME THE DYKES! Here come the dykes!” A few seasoned attendees began the chant, as if to hasten the proceedings, celebrate our gathering in public space, and denote a protest action in one breath. They were swiftly joined by the rest of the intergenerational mix. This boisterous full house had gathered at New York City’s LGBT Community Center last month to see Joan E. Biren’s (“JEB”’s) sapphic slide lecture The Dyke Show, an alternative history of photography devoted to lesbian photographers and subjects, made in 1979, the heyday of feminist lesbian separatism. Officially hosted by the

“REFASHIONING” at the Japan Society in New York brings together two emerging fashion labels—Tokyo’s Wataru Tominaga and downtown Manhattan’s CFGNY—as Asian American cultural politics arrive at a critical juncture. Spikes in reported violence against Asians have tapped into a wellspring of mounting anger, tensions that often become assuaged with commercial ventures like fashion, art, and lifestyle. It is a seductive, glittering dream: that “refashioning” one’s personal choices can bring about sweeping change comparable to total political reordering. This context leaves the designers here with a