Thomas Crow News Today

With the colder weather settling in, why not curl up with an art book? ArtsHub looks at the latest releases that are perfect autumn art reads, and book fairs.

Canada Choate on Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.

On Amada Cruz's cancellation of “Three American Painters: Then and Now.”

As editor in chief of Artforum from 1977 to 1980, Joseph Masheck published a series of five articles tracing ways that twentieth-century abstraction remained subtly rooted in Christian conceptualities and antetypes. With titles like “Cruciformality” and “Iconicity,” these articles were less concerned with religious iconographies (the ubiquity of cross-shaped structures in modernist painting, for example) than with understanding how nonobjective art was (re)processing religious logics, pr...

Historicization may be part of what we expect from art, but Fredrick Jameson’s recommendation that one “Always historicize” sounds like a rule. The problem, I think, is the word ‘“always.” It makes it sound as though historicism is always the same and always observed or digested in the same way. “Always” is an absolute, everything else other than absolutely nothing isn’t.

“Always historicize!”, exclaims Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, although to tell the truth I actually tracked down where the quote came from on his Wikipedia page.1 It sounds definitive, determinative, orthodoxly Marxist, until one reads the book carefully and realizes that he is in fact suggesting the opposite: that at the end of this process of “historicization” we will discover what it is about the work of art that cannot...

This week, the editors pair two pieces by Hal Foster: his 2012 essay on Artforum’s early years and a new appraisal of The Anti-Aesthetic at forty.“The notion of postmodernism was once a great stimulant to art and thought,” Hal Foster writes in Artforum’s September issue. “Today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past.” The critic’s reflections on the intellectual hothouse that produced The Anti-Aesthetic—edited in 1983 by Foster at the tender age of twenty-eig...

A rare and important gilt bronze Tibetan Buddha blasted through its $200-$300 pre-sale estimate to finish at a staggering $200,000 in an online Fine E

The 13-inch-tall Tibetan bronze seated Buddha on a carved, 5-inch-tall stand showed a serene-faced figure wearing a draped robe, posed in quiet contemplation.

Of all our government institutions, the Supreme Court may be the most sacrosanct, the very...