Last December The Times published an article about an exhibition at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, titled “Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960.” The show spotlights 85 rarely seen works in the … Continue reading
This gallery contains 1 photo.
Things need to work themselves out.A round of unkinking is due.Mistakes were made. Put a few fires out. Make nice again.Fast backward to the good times.Park the ordnance. Cool your jets. The killing, the killing, give it a rest! LOLBled … Continue reading
Over her 38-year career at The Times, Ms. Smith cultivated a reputation for intimate observations conveyed in accessible prose. I became a critic in the same way a lot of people become critics: by immersing themselves in a subject and … Continue reading
It’s possible to attribute eccentric form to lineated discourse that’s unscannable. Discard capitalization, italics and punctuation. What’s left is line. Lines have their element, like a fish its water, in white space aka page space. The writer commandeers spacing as … Continue reading
The thin, gray quality of the old man’s face suggest [sic] that even a Zen master’s identity is evanescent, while the dark intensity of his eyes captures the timeless persistence of his understanding. A series of feathery, beautiful strokes come … Continue reading
Shopify helps you do your thinghowever you chi-ching. Mollify. Fortify. Qualify. Beautify. Ossify. The ‘-fy’ pattern is a fertile template for neologisms associated with chi-chinging. “Shopify” is a platform, an ambience, a tool suite, a code base, a launchpad, whatever; … Continue reading
For me, a learning translation (which may lead later to an “artistic” one) starts with inserting English phraseology that tracks the Arabic as closely as possible. This creates a “trot” that mirrors the source’s structures. The goal is to understand … Continue reading
When I was there, I walked the streets with Denia Nealy, an artist who goes by Czar, and my friend Brenda Ann Kenneally, a photographer and writer, who would shout names, and people would instantly emerge. A stranger offered a … Continue reading
I would dislike him if I could build a case from the visible evidence equal in strength to my itch to dislike him. But beauty kicks in. (Peter Schjeldahl on sculptor Richard Serra) (c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights … Continue reading
EthicalDative 
‘There’s Nothing There Except the Pictures’
The artist Jim Nutt has been making a version of this imagined portrait for the last 40 years, a mode that has dominated his practice… His women never age, never seem to dislodge from a midcentury stylistic amber: all wearing … Continue reading →