You can try if you want, but it’s hard to avoid using the word legendary in describing Miriam Makeba. 

There are few philosophers today who engage the art world in the way Arthur C. Danto does.

Donald Baechler has amassed a great inventory of worldly images. Recorded on slides and collected in the archives of his enormous Lower Manhattan studio, they are the sources for many of the compelling images in his paintings. 

“The computer is particular to its age. It’s the tool that’s available now. I didn’t mean to explore it, but it made its way into my world.”

“Even if you’re a punk you can have feelings of love and friendship.” Julien Temple

Set in and around his native Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon’s stories struggle with a world abruptly changing, and his characters.

“A lot of things are a mix of high and low, but people just don’t say it. This high and low thing shifts. Maybe Shakespeare was the Spielberg of his day.”

I don’t know what they mean, but blassive and glisstic, bloculate and perhaps indevalent are good words to describe Amy Sillman’s paintings.

Giovanni Rizzoli’s forms are visual fragments from the historical past and the artist’s personal memories. 

The process of making photographs is full of mind twists: upside downs, downside ups, negatives/positives, blacks/whites…The camera sees with a lens that projects an upside-down image on the ground glass of a view camera. 

We are outdoors, in Plano, Illinois, and a man with a squeegee is washing a window. He never stops: he places his bucket down and starts again. We are uncomfortably in the present tense, 100 percent live in a post-Happening virtual universe.

He has seen these cliffs before, in picture books. He has seen the wide beaches and the ruined cathedral. 

I came to London, carrying one blue vinyl suitcase, believing it was possible to escape the past. There was history in London but it was not my history.

In Paris, she lived on rue Guynemer. Rue Guynemer is named after a very young and very handsome World War I pilot—she knew, she had seen his photograph in the war museum at the Invalides.

The plays of Craig Lucas are written with a keen awareness for theatrical space and theatrical silence and includes a wide spectrum of situations: mourning lovers, Hollywood assholes, street kids and more.

The film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s cult classic Jesus’ Son retains the essence of the written work, converting Johnson’s language to film language to convey realism and isolation.

Gabriel Byrne delivers a “painfully raw and ungracefully poetic” performance in A Moon for the Misbegotten, writes reviewer Nicole Burdette.

With his interactive display of multicolored concentric rectangles, vintage record players covered in sequins and yarn-covered jazz records, artist Jim Lambie presents work with an ingenious appeal.

Coco Fusco guides us on a journey into a map of the Americas that we might not have known existed. Full of essays, testimonies and position papers on American artists, Fusco’sCorpus Delecti informs and seduces.

Sam Lipsyte’s work may be grouped into the minimalist genre, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything subverted about the content of his new collection Venus Drive.

In his second collection of essays, funeral director and poet Thomas Lynch embraces wider and more personal themes, touching upon emotional instability, marriage, children and the search for meaning.

Abigail Thomas adds new complexity to the memoir genre with her varying points of view and page-turning content. She writes about all that life has to offer in the way of birth, death, promiscuity and regret.

Sheila Kohler praises Margot Livesey’s ability to create characters “who have all the unmistakable complexity, capacity for humor, and sheer ordinariness of everyday human beings.”

Edmund White discusses the memoir of nephew Keith Fleming as well a the circumstances that brought the two together in the 1970s.

Saxophonist John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards inherits an alter ego and a knack for vocals on his new album The Legendary Marvin Pontiac’s Greatest Hits.

Bette Gordon discusses all of the ways that East is East succeeds as a great work of cinema: it’s funny, warm, fresh and complex, with a outstanding performances to boot.

Virginia Rodrigues showcases a near-godly voice on her album Nós, evoking love, blind faith, and a reaching beyond the self.

Gustav Mahler is reimagined as wholly postmodern, combining jazz improvisors, DJ and cantor in a collision that transcends kitsch.

According to Glenn O’Brien, David Johnson and the Harry Smiths “brings to life biorhythms all too often filtered out by digital thinking and bad posture. This is the real deal…”