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The Wyeths: A Family Portrait
“The Wyeth saga began with N.C.: a maverick unimpressed by his industrializing world who became infatuated instead with adventure, romance, and old America––back when the connection between humanity and nature was more immediate.”
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For Yan Pei-Ming, One Portrait Size Fits All
“As I sat on the bench in the center of the exhibition room, dwarfed by the mammoth panels of the tryptic, I considered my reaction.”
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The Sculptures that Surround Us
Brief descriptions of artistic objects you walk past on Princeton’s campus.
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One-Minute Devotions
“I wondered what or who—a simple puzzle, a stakeless one, but one that, in context, made my expectation of strangeness a mystery lived.”
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Pete Recommends: A Critical Reappraisal of Stairway to Heaven
“But both in spite and because of this ubiquity, “Stairway to Heaven” gets a little slept on, relegated to the status of “rock classic” and thought of as a song more to be heard than to be enjoyed.”
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Nass Recommends: (Sandy) Alex G’s House of Sugar
“House of Sugar takes us to these places, into the real labyrinths of drug addiction, the landscapes and dreamscapes where the whole thing actually goes down.”
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Emo Rap: A Eulogy
“Lil Peep’s ghostly vocals float drowsily over maximalist emo-trap beats without drowning in them…leaving us with a taste of what might have been: the soaring emotional heights to which rap, the most notoriously heartless genre, almost rose.”
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To Proclaim a Dying World
“A museum setting might sterilize the dread of the inevitable ending at which any chronological exhibit explicitly in conversation with environmentalism must arrive. But the accessibility of this juxtaposition right up front makes sure one is clued into that inevitability and made to feel it violently.”
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Tadao Ando, ma and Me
“Walking through French Baroque palaces-turned-museums and pushing through crowds at the New York Met is a traditional, storied cultural method of viewing Great Masters hanging in gilded frames on the walls. Walking into the Monet room at the Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan, however, is more like visiting a shrine.”
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Barbed Beauty
“Perhaps we must accept that we are simply watchers of beautiful forms. And if we acknowledge that we are observers, bound by our own frailties and limitations, we may be able to rescue the memory of what was, for an instant, exquisite.”