Critics Page News Today

This is what I think: that one feels nothing while writing a poem and only sort of thinks. It’s a high-wire act. Maybe. And the feelings associated with a poem, long or short, are entities from before and after the writing of the poem—which may well contain them—but one doesn’t, even cannot, experience them while writing.

I’m writing the introduction to this month’s Critics Page as the year 2023 is coming to an end, a year in which I’ve spent much time with the idea of queer heartbr(ache). It began when my friend and cosmic mirror (our birthdays are exactly six months apart) Le’Andra LeSeur and I had our first significant heart to heart about recent breakups that had left us tender.

The practice of art law has continued to develop rapidly in recent years, as stakeholders in the art world have come to realize that the innovative practice of law can support and protect artistic creativity. In developing the Critics Page for this issue, I wanted to highlight the importance of, and the challenges posed by, legal structures and frameworks in artistic practice. This Critics Page highlights many of these innovative art law issues that sustain (or contest) contemporary art practice...

The words we bring to art intend, at best, to translate the perceptual realm into the linguistic, anchoring sensation through definition. But, as we all know, that often doesn’t occur. The well known essay, “International Art English” by Alix Rule and David Levine skewers that premise, as does Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) nearly forty years earlier, and a decade before that Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” resisted language’s simulacrum of ar...

Because this month I had the honor of acting as Guest Editor for the Critics Page, where I invited global curators and scholars to contribute a word they’d like to see or never see again in the discourse around art and technology, I thought I would develop this month’s column around the words that artists use and encounter about their practice—across media. So I asked them what silly, uncomfortable, or productive term they encountered. It could be something said to them or somethi...

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.