Tag Archives: style

The Guitars and Drums Do Most of the Talking

Posted on July 26, 2026 by JMN

Since I fancy myself poetry curious, I’m ashamed that the lyrics of most rock songs constitute for me so little of the listening experience. I rarely register more than the odd phrase that penetrates the instrumental layer. The frontpersons (I … Continue reading →

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Paul Thek, Practitioner of ‘Crude Figuration’

Posted on July 16, 2026 by JMN

Although Thek possessed impressive skills as a draftsman and painter, he was an early practitioner of the crude figuration of “bad painting” (a term coined by Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum). I don’t know how seriously to … Continue reading →

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‘A.I. Imagery Is Hollowing Out the Very Basis of Depiction’

Posted on June 20, 2026 by JMN

The beech tree [German Buche] is a witness, a bystander, a memorial. A collection of them would be a beech forest, or Buchenwald. Today we are cursed… to live in a time of extreme image hyperplasia. Computationally produced pictures (there … Continue reading →

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‘We’re More Than the Sum of Our Camera Rolls’

Posted on June 14, 2026 by JMN

“I simply think that we have not yet got over the Romantic epoch. Romanticism is far from dead. Exactly like fascism.” (Gerhard Richter, 1973) … He began to paint directly from photographs: family album pictures, clippings from newspapers or encyclopedias, … Continue reading →

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Purulence, Pus, Matter? Anointed or Kohl’d?

Posted on June 11, 2026 by JMN

I was sleepless, and I passed the night keeping vigil, as if my eyes had been anointed with pus, […] That’s Arberry’s reliable translation of line 1 of the sixth-century elegy on the death of her brother Sakhr by the … Continue reading →

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Never Too Many Books

Posted on November 21, 2025 by JMN

… Peter-Ayers Tarantino[’s aesthetic] recalls that of maximalist bibliophiles of centuries past, including Marcel Proust and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, was formed during a life on the road. In the Abstract Expressionism section, Tarantino extracts, almost without looking, a thick … Continue reading →

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And One More Thing…

Posted on November 17, 2025 by JMN

I adore compression and spareness, and Infinite Jest, finished at 7:29PM on 11-16-25, is bloated and prolix. It tells you something that it’s a novel with footnotes. Hundreds of them. During the periods when I ground my teeth, it tracked … Continue reading →

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Rooms That Photograph Like Paintings

Posted on October 31, 2025 by JMN

“I’m going to hesitate and say it’s settled into what it’s meant to be.” (Martyn Thompson) I was taken with the handmade rooms in Martyn Thompson’s Sydney, Australia home. They’re atmospherically profiled in the photographs. Each shot has a painterly … Continue reading →

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Untie These Hidebound Eyes, Unbind These Hogtied Hands

Posted on July 12, 2025 by JMN

Jason Farago-rhymes-with-Chicago writes a deep, reflective appreciation of Cézanne’s work, calling Cézanne the first painter he ever loved.  BC*: For six centuries, ever since some scientifically minded Florentines had developed rules of perspective that made art look more like life, … Continue reading →

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‘His Technique Can Be Potently Slapdash’

Posted on May 31, 2025 by JMN

If the images in the survey feel more like news than comment, that’s partly because we can sense the press photos Shahn used as his sources. Though his paintings themselves aren’t close to photorealistic — his technique can be potently … Continue reading →

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