Arts + Culture

Julie Lasky|Essays

The Photography of Mark Robbins

Mark Robbins exhibition at Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, 2003Mark Robbins' Households is a collection of portraits in which the sitters are sometimes sitting rooms (or kitchens or bedrooms), and the people are polished, draped, and …

Alissa Walker|Essays

Why Scientology is Good for Hollywood

If you live where I do, in the actual city of Hollywood, just a few blocks away from where the Oscars are held, you see the Church of Scientology as somewhat of a savior. Within a two-mile corridor along Hollywood Boulevard, the Church …

Michael Bierut|Essays

I Am a Plagiarist

Plagiarism is a hot topic in the world of publishing, What does it mean in the world of design? Michael Bierut pleads guilty.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Disaster Relief 101: No Door Hanger Left Behind

Door hangers seem the perfect metaphor for FEMA’s failure: they’re one-dimensional, unnecessarily complicated, and basically useless.

Willis Regier|Essays

In Remembrance of Richard Eckersley

Design by Richard Eckersley. (Detail from copyright page of Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, 1989)Richard Eckersley died on April 16, having given the best years of his life to establishing …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Art of Thinking Through Making

I am at heart an irrepressible classicist who likes my type justified and prefers Merchant Ivory to Miramax. I'm an incorrigible Anglophile, a devoted Francophile and I am utterly convinced that my DNA is heavily weighted toward the first …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Propensity for Density

T-Shirt Detail, 2006. Designer unknown.On a recent trip to Los Angeles, we stayed with a friend whose remarkable art collection included work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin and the painter Squeak Carnwath, prompting more than a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Sequence in Time

Euripedes, the Greek playwright, once observed that time would explain it all. It was a poetic suggestion, yet to date, remains somewhat inconclusive. True, the passage of time might be said to characterize everything from the Mexican …

William Drenttel|Essays

Meet Me in St. Louis: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

Exterior view, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Photograph by Robert Pettus, 2004.Nine months ago I went to St. Louis and had a memorable art experience. In and of itself, such an event should not seem so special. This is, after all, …

Lawrence Weschler|Essays

Languorous Bodyscapes

Mysterious Cloud Over Los Angeles, Photographer Unknown, November 1976.So I was visiting my friends Pepe and Dionora in Santiago, Chile, a while back — they're great art lovers and their apartment nests a collection of marvelous …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Broadcast vs. Broadband

Remember the early 1990s, when techno-evangelists promised that television as we know it would soon be replaced by a searchable database of streaming video available at any time on your computer? Today, with the near-ubiquity of …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Give Me Privacy or Give Me an ID Card

Illustration by Paula Scher for Subjective Reasoning, issue entitled "Useless Information," published by Champion Paper, 1992.When I was 11 years old, I saw my mother's passport for the first time. This seemingly inconsequential event was, …