The utilitarian function of the museum as mere container has long been eclipsed by its function as signifying apparatus. On the one hand, the design of the interior is responsible for the terms of encounter with individual works of art. On the other hand, the shape of the exterior mediates and proclaims a role for art within the surrounding architectural landscape, cultural mise-en-scène, and even historical moment.

The existence of these inflammatory sermons was portrayed as a news-event in itself, but for many Americans the real news should have been this: black people are not happy with America the way you’re happy with America.

Inevitably and with curious necessity, the recitation of trivia turns to the subject of death-counts. This is because the death-count is the ne plus ultra of trivia: “how many people died there.”

This is not a eulogy; it is not a ritualized recounting and remembrance of a man's life pronounced with threnody enough to disquiet but not to deject.

St. Paul once wrote, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Rebecca Sealfon ’05 probably would have kicked his ass.

Something’s rotten on Sesame Street. The particular putrefaction of which I write is not one borne of organic decay; rather, it arises from a constellation of things which would seem prima facie to signify otherwise: rosy-cheeked health, hygienic propriety, balanced-meals, and proper exercise. Yet the modern scourge of nutrition ...

Cormac McCarthy has established himself as one of the great American authors of the 20th century. His magnificent Border Trilogy, comprised of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities on the Plain, told the hardscrabble yet ethereal tale of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham as they roamed an ...

“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.”
-Jesus, Matthew 18:8

“Your right eye is half-a-millimeter too high,” Dr. Christian Troy informs an aspiring model during the pilot-episode of Nip/Tuck. “And you have an Irish nose,” he quickly adds as if the physiognomic comment of a moment previous ...

The political history of South Carolina is full of funny stories. Yet amid a landscape scarred by utter military catastrophe, deep racial injustice, and still bitter historical tragedy, these stories seem sometimes not so funny. Or maybe they’re funnier. During the presidency of Franklin Pierce, Congressman Preston Brooks cudgeled Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death with his cane.

Photographs are unquestionably deemed to be accurate representations of the real; whereas a painting is inherently considered to be a fictive interpretation of its subject, a photograph simply reports its subject as it is. Or does it? How is this promise of visual fidelity compromised by the familiar repertoire of ...

“France is just a country. America is a concept.”
-Jean Baudrillard

“Killing the Angel in the House,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “is part of the occupation of a woman writer.” This particular epithet had come to encapsulate the Victorian stereotype of sexual frigidity, otherworldly purity, and picture-perfect domesticity which was the ego-ideal for a century of unhappy women. Joyce Carol Oates has taken Woolf’s literary dictum to the next level: her Angels are not themselves killed; they themselves kill.

The Morning After
Virginia said she would make the breakfast herself.
For it was a beautiful London morning in June. She kicked back the covers and looked at Cady Stanton’s luscious ass. Smelled faintly of honeysuckle. Or was that patchouli?
In the kitchen, Virginia semi-consciously cooked three eggs. She ...

It’s like one of those Twilight Zone epiphanies that arrives midway through an episode to thwart the lately begotten hopes and dreams of whatever poor fool thought he caught a lucky break or maybe had a good thing going. So get this. You’re living in Utah. You have ...

Come for the shouting and shattered glass, stay for the confessional outbursts, wry dialogue, and fascinating sexual politics. This superb production, directed by Whitney Mosery ’08, presents the tragic aftermath of a man’s inexplicable affair with a goat – the traditional mascot of lechery. In this play, which is something ...

A few years ago the song “Fortunate Son” was used in a commercial for Wrangler Jeans. To many this seemed yet another belated obituary for the 60’s, yet another testament to the casual victory of the Establishment. After all, here was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s rumbling indictment of Vietnam-era ...

1. “Picasso and American Art” (through Jan. 28, 2007) at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century. Or so I contend. One measure of his greatness, currently on display at the Whitney’s superb exhibition “Picasso and American Art” is as a ...

It’s fitting that the two floors housing the exhibitions “Picasso and American Art” (reviewed in the issue of October 12) and “Edward Hopper: Highlights from the Collection” are adjacent. These shows typify two different trends of 20th century American art in response to the welter of European modernism: on ...

I. “Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde” at the Met
Investing Vollard with the almost statesmanlike title, “Patron of the Avant-Garde” is pretty generous for someone Paul Gauguin once called “the worst kind of crocodile.” Maecenas he wasn’t. Vollard was somewhere between racketeer and true believer ...

Frankly, I hope he rots in hell. There is no figure more odious than the man who supplants democracy with tyranny. Augusto Pinochet sailed into power on the crest of the military coup d�etat that threw democratic President Salvador Allende out of office and into a coffin.

Before I launch into abstract, quasi-provable thoughts as to why the Vagina Monologues rocks my socks, I’ll put forth two concrete arguments for why this show, opening February 15th, is unique, funny,
and well worth seeing.

Many works of art have emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as part of the collective struggle to commemorate, understand, and situate them within the rapidly coalescing frieze of our shared memory. Thanks to the plethora of novels sprung up in the ashes of disaster, we are now privy to such worthwhile phenomena of universal human interest as the tone-poetic hi-jinks of the chattering classes in the months preceding the big event, as in Claire Messud’s respectable novel The Emperor’s Children, and the annoyingly precious musings of the insufferably earnest, as in Jonathan Safran Foer’s not-so-respectable novella Extremely Loud and Incredible Close.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.”
-Walter Benjamin

In a word: fucking awesome. Three hours and 11 minutes of sheer glory in the form of people killing people and saying cool shit and blowing stuff up. Did I mention zombies and girl power? One darksome eve we pilgrims five set out upon a long road of black asphalt ...

Jean Baudrillard was a poor philosopher and a poorer sociologist. As a writer, he was inconsistent and cracked-out – as much inclined to the output of turgid rivers of prose clotted with effluvial jargon as he was to effervescent plunges of galvanic insight. As a theorist, he was one of the ...

Every now and then there comes a book which is like an arrow shot into the heart of things because it has the power to redeem the fading, diffuse enterprise of bookselling and novel-gazing both, all the misbegotten hours spent in trains and libraries and the whole history of a ...

“Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” plead Shylock to the barrister, and indeed what characterizes Jewish history in the main is calamity and tribulation of a scope and cruelty so reckless and undreamt they seem enjoined from another universe. As Shylock suggests, extraordinary persecution is so far the ...

Many people have remarked upon the similarities between Emma Yates’ recent op-ed in the Prince, “Getting unlucky on Valentine’s day,” (published 2/22/08) and Francisco Nava’s infamous op-ed, “Princeton’s latex lies,” (published 11/7/07).
Both take theatrical umbrage at the prevalence of a “hookup culture.” Both take aim at the imaginary misdeeds of university or student organizations: Nava objects to the distribution of condoms by University Health Services (UHS), while Yates objects to the cavalier advertisement of the availability of condoms through posters circulated by the Sexual Health Advisors (SHA).