"Hotel Terminus" continues along trajectories found throughout artist Stephen Lapthisophon's installations and collages. It weaves fragments of an everyday variety into a complex structural dialogue. Individual images are often altered and slightly t...

Over the past few decades, site-specific art has evolved into an international phenomenon, drawing viewers to installations in familiar public arenas as well as remote and unusual places. Irish artist Dorothy Cross has emerged as one of the form's mo...

"Let us agree", Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, "that one of man's most beautiful postures is that of St. Sebastian". "In my 'Saint Sebastian' I remember you", Salvador Dali replied to Garcia Lorca, referring to the essay on aesthetics that Dali had j...

If the closure of Modernist painting is taken as the closure of painting itself, then under the aegis of postmodernism, painting's history is a finite collection of fully legible styles up for being quoted. In this circumstance, the question arises o...

Poets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and lea...

We "take to our beds" to be born and to grow, to hide and to dream, to lie alone and cling together, to come of age and make love, to create and procreate, to ail and to heal, to rest and to die. Key rites of human passage occur underneath the swathe...

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelso...

American art of the 1980s is as misunderstood as it is notorious. Critics of the time feared that market hype and self-promotion threatened the integrity of art. They lashed out at contemporary art, questioning the validity of particular media and me...

With "The Invention of Art", Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention – that the lines drawn between art and craft resul...

In "Venus in Exile" renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art – the female subject and or...