First Love and Irresistible Impulses

First Love and Irresistible Impulses

First Love and Irresistible Impulses Or the man who licked the Vermeer My first boyfriend, in college, always smelled of Ivory soap. It was a clean, innocent scent, like baby powder or shampoo, and therefore perhaps appropriate for young love. For years after we broke...
Marc Baseman

Marc Baseman

Marc Baseman The world according to Marc Baseman is a strange, crowded, and mysterious place. In his tiny drawings—usually less than three inches on a side—a cast of odd characters and objects competes for our attention: birds and rodents, guys in business suits, a...
By the Book

By the Book

By the Book Artists Tell Us About Their Favorites The very first art books I remember reading (or perhaps just looking at with awe and wonder) were part of the series called “Metropolitan Seminars in Art,” written by the critic John Canaday. Each slender gray volume...
Martha Russo

Martha Russo

  Martha Russo A tour of Martha Russo’s retrospective at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary art in Boulder, CO, is somewhat like a visit to admire the creepy-crawlies in a ten-year-old boy’s bedroom. There is a giant, slithery sculpture on the floor that looks a...
Artists Behaving Badly

Artists Behaving Badly

Artists Behaving Badly How to tell if you're really a narcissist A recent report in the Huffington Post alleges that “narcissistic artists were determined to have higher market prices, higher estimates from auction houses, more museum shows, and more recognition from...