Opinion How We Ended Up in the Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste The Humanities Crash and the McNamara Fallacy in culture. By Ben Davis, Mar 30, 2023
Art Criticism ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ Is a Truly Great Artist Documentary. Here’s What Makes It Work So Well The film, which explores the life of Nan Goldin, is directed by Laura Poitras. By Ben Davis, Mar 15, 2023
Art World What I’m Looking At: Nude Dudes Doing the Laocoön at O’Flaherty’s, the Plot to Incept Capitalist Realism, and Other Stuff at the Edge of Art Highlights from New York galleries from the last few weeks. By Ben Davis, Mar 8, 2023
Art & Tech We Asked ChatGPT About Art Theory. It Led Us Down a Rabbit Hole So Perplexing We Had to Ask Hal Foster for a Reality Check A simple ChatGPT inquiry turned into a very strange ride. By Ben Davis, Mar 2, 2023
Art Criticism What on Earth Are We Supposed to Do With the Outrageous Art of CumWizard69420? Let me take you on a little tour of "The Americans" at Cheim & Read. By Ben Davis, Feb 28, 2023
Opinion What’s the Deal With That Essay About How the ‘Waffle House Brawl’ Is Like an Edward Hopper Painting? Here’s My Guess Viral culture is flattening everything into one incoherent mass. By Ben Davis, Feb 6, 2023
Reviews Why It’s Worth Savoring Leonor Fini’s Enchanted Surrealism at Kasmin + Other Things to See and Read Plus, the Mariah Carey "I don't know her" meme as art, and the "New Ugliness" theorized. By Ben Davis, Feb 1, 2023
Reviews An Extremely Intelligent Lava Lamp: Refik Anadol’s A.I. Art Extravaganza at MoMA Is Fun, Just Don’t Think About It Too Hard We need to talk about willful misreading of dystopia in the art-tech conversation. By Ben Davis, Jan 23, 2023
The Burns Halperin Report Is the Art World Entering the Age of ‘Anti-Woke’ Backlash? Here’s Why Today’s Reaction Will Look Very Different From Decades’ Past How today's tech bro-powered vibe shift might represent a different kind of backlash than we saw in the 1990s. By Ben Davis, Dec 20, 2022
Politics Art Luminaries Express Solidarity With the New School’s Striking Teachers as the University Threatens to Bring in ‘Scabs’ Parsons School of Design, the famed art school, is included in the strike. By Ben Davis, Dec 6, 2022
Opinion I Visited New York’s Immersive Klimt Spectacular With One of the World’s Preeminent Gustav Klimt Experts. Here’s What Happened Jane Kallir took "Gold in Motion," as the immersive experience is called, more seriously than I expected she might. By Ben Davis, Nov 29, 2022
Opinion There Has to Be a Better Way to Argue About the Climate-Activist Attacks on Art The strategy of "pushing cultural buttons" comes with a price. By Ben Davis, Nov 21, 2022
People There Will Never Be Another Art Critic Like Peter Schjeldahl What the late 'New Yorker' art critic meant to me. By Ben Davis, Oct 31, 2022
Politics After 19 Bitter Days on Strike, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Union Has Reached a Tentative Deal With Management If the contract is approved by the union's members, they will return to work on Monday. By Ben Davis, Oct 14, 2022
Art World Did This Man Really Burn a $10 Million Frida Kahlo on Camera Just to Sell NFTs? We Did a Frame-by-Frame Analysis of the YouTube Video It may or may not be a real drawing. But the party thrown for the burning was very real, and it's documented on YouTube. By Ben Davis, Sep 28, 2022