“Art encompasses philosophy, psychology, humor, politics, physics—a way of being able to talk about anything, while at the same time involving this thrill of perception.” Liz Larner

“History always starts twice.” Bernard Piffaretti

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“Many people who study composition start out as improvisers in jazz or rock, working in bands on music that is not particularly notated. They hear some crazy and wild music and they want to figure out how it works; they hear a piece by Charles Ives or Cage or whatever, and then they want to be able to do that, but it comes out of a visceral impulse.” Anthony Coleman

“I was writing 16-hour days. The real difficulty was writing the fractured language. My tendency is to make everything beautiful.”

“You don’t have to understand something for it to be a pleasure.” Kimiko Hahn

“I’m trying not to be separated. I like trying to be a medium.” Mei—Mei Berssenbrugge

“There’s so much talk in America about families, and it’s a tragedy if it’s American families, but if it’s families in other countries, it’s not as tragic. Perhaps it’s compassion fatigue.” William Forsythe

“Even though my films don’t deal with any specific political agenda, the reason I have this through-line of violence is due to the events I witnessed as a college student, and the fear and pain I felt during those times.” Park Chanwook

“Because when you’re in love, you’re not just one person, you’re several people.” Romulus Linney

In the slave yard, it sets a standard. Desperate folks demonstrating who is hardier, or more foolish. 

HOMECOMING. There’s something so elegiac about this trip to New Orleans. Traveling alone, to my childhood home, a home recently shattered and in ruins. I’ve been feeling ill and out of sorts. I am underslept. My head and back hurt. My stomach is sour. I cannot stop the thought, morbid, that I am returning home to die.

The blue lights flippes on. Smoky haze drifted above the tables.

“Introducing, from Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!”

Dona Nelson on how Steven Charles’s nearsightedness aids and inspires the creation of his swarming, colorful, jam-packed abstracts.

Mimi Thompson and Keith Sonnier on how Lluis Lleó’s family lineage and his interest in cooking inspire him, as well as how his paintings dare to extend out into space.

Whether sneaking into maximum-security prisons or leading unauthorized expeditions to secret military bases, Trevor Paglen combines rigorous research with aesthetic savvy. 

I begin my drawing classes by reminding my students that all art is mathematics. 

Ruins fit William Basinski well—in his compositions, grand melodies, and classical structures are reduced to ghosts. 

Last year, it became clear that the new crop of boy bands had quit harmonizing on stools in fedoras and line dancing in their videos, and had started picking up guitars.

On April 30th Jennifer Montgomery screened Threads of Belonging, her 2003 feature-length experimental video on the anti-psychiatry movement embodied in a fictive therapeutic community, at Orchard Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. Montgomery’s first feature, Art for Teachers of Children, chronicled a boarding-school student’s affair with her photography teacher that bore a stark resemblance in spirit and history to Jock Sturges and Montgomery herself. 

Robert Flaherty invented ethnographic filmmaking, and Jean Rouch transformed it into sociology. 

When viewing the 11 DVDs that make up Point of View, it is important to remember that this is only the most recent chapter in a century of artists’ engagement in experimental filmmaking. 

Dear Young Artist,

Twenty-three diversely established artists have responded to your letter seeking advice about art and life in Nuevo York. 

In his new collection of critical essays, writer Alan Gilbert leads a probing, borderless investigation into countless contemporary moments in aesthetics that recognize, inhabit, resist, essentially interact with the realm of the social. 

There is something inexhaustible in Homer’s Odyssey that makes us want to go back to it, to the archetype of a hero’s going forth and arduous return, of bravery and cunning, and, finally, of the test of a wife’s fidelity. 

At the height of the war in Vietnam, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov articulated the best of radically different political practices.