Winner of the Whitney Museum’s first Bucksbaum award in 2000, Paul Pfeiffer has received attention over the last few years for his provocative digital video production.

Pat Steir has been at the forefront of American painting for a number of years. She seems ageless. Her role as female literal painter takes on epic proportions

This conversation took place on the occasion of Tom Sachs’s recent exhibition at the Bohen Foundation in the meatpacking district of New York. Nutsy’s is a commissioned work that will travel to the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin later this year. 

Born in 1921 in Jamaica, Queens, Marie Ponsot published her first book of poems, True Minds(1957), in the legendary City Lights poetry series, which also included Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. I

I first met Steven Millhauser some 16 years ago, when, with my friend Ed Hirsch along as a somewhat disinterested coconspirator, I induced Steven to meet us at the Russian Tea Room.

I might as well tell you straight up: I’m in love with Meshell Ndegeocello. I also should admit that I kind of slept on her exploits until I got to know her a little bit. Now I can’t imagine not knowing her or her music.

Even among that vibrant flock of downtown New York performer-playwrights (Wallace Shawn, Eric Bogosian, Holly Hughes), David Greenspan sticks out as a rare bird.

In a letter to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, written in November 1912, George Bernard Shaw cleverly described himself as follows: “He will fill his fountain pen with your heart’s blood, and sell your most sacred emotions on the stage.

Steve DiBenedetto forces a lot of perspectives into his pictures. As he puts it, “I like to put in too many skies.” 

Nearly six years ago, after a long day of wandering Chelsea in a daze, I walked into 303 Gallery looking for a good painting show and instead had my first Aitken encounter. 

Diana Cooper’s work is a high-wire act.

Thomas Nozkowski on how Richard Rezac’s sculptures manage to balance eccentricity and concept with accessibility and familiarity.

Shoka slipped the ticket into her coat pocket and left the cinema. 

In the plum, thickly carpeted, overly waitered dining room of the Standard Club of Chicago, my grandfather and my father are finishing lunch. 

My mother died in the middle of the night. In my mind’s eye, I see it like the lights turning off in an old factory, shutting down one circuit bank at a time, an electric hum the only thing remaining.

Montezuma II sacrificed a baby giraffe that was given to Hernán Cortés just before his conquest of the New World.

When I was a boy, my father always told me, “If you kill something, boy, you’ve got to eat it.” It’s the way of the world, he’d tell me, and only right and just besides. 

To get back to my success, I am easily upset. They think I am afraid of this kind of thing.

Evoking both sympathy and alienation, filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki portrays the Finnish lowerclass through an amnesiac’s eyes in Man Without a Past.

Filmmaker Lee Jaffe switches media to produce a book on the story of Bob Marley’s band The Wailers and the history of reggae music.

Pulseprogramming’s fourth album is not just an audio experience: listeners also get to view video art designed for a live performance of “Don’t Swell Up Your Glass Pocket” and construct their own model farmhouse from the liner notes.

David Krasnow redefines the word “standard” with his recommendation of Jenny Toomey’s husky-breathy and well-timed performance of Franklin Bruno’s songs.

Painter Julie Langsam suggests the failures of two artistic movements—Romanticism and modernism—through her use of non-traditional landscape styles.

Allen Frame’s art book Detour is an elegant high-art photo album that chronicles everyday lives from Brooklyn to Budapest, São Paolo to St. Petersburg, on a first-name basis.

Marjorie Welish explores the theoretical implications of Guillermo Kuitca’s large-scale paintings of imagined CD covers for his favorite recordings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Meet psych major and boxer Liz McGonigal, bluesman and entrepreneur Buddy Guy, and cops-turned-muses Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso in Carlo Rotella’s anthology of blue-collar life stories Good with Their Hands.

Edward Carey’s whimsical and affecting novel Alva & Irva is the story of twins who create a tiny city only to have it racked by an earthquake.

The characters in ZZ Packer’s story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere cope with the tension between wanting to escape and yearning to be included.