from “A Mouth Holds Many Things”
“These works sometimes manifest in multiple forms that cannot be contained by the print page alone.” -Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan, Co-Editors
“Paris! Appalachia!” (or How to Live Where You Are)
The beauty Thomas and Spradlin identify in this city is not the architectural grandeur funded by steel robber barons, or city-sanctioned ‘aerosol art,’ but the interplay of the wall and the graffiti; the law and rejection of the law; the memorial and the refusal to pay homage to a memory.
Forever Contemporary: On the Entrenchment of Taste in the Art World
The impassioned disputations on taste and aesthetics at the now-maligned Salons were disputations on ethics, morals, and politics. As in our art world, taste was an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.
All Hat No Cattle: On The Marfa Invitational Art Fair
This is The West, I think: where fantasy displaces the real for profit. As a transplant to the state of Texas, I have a strange desire to see that displacement, which is why I’ve come here, expecting the Marfa Invitational to bring this phenomenon into stark relief.
Writing for the Future: On Melissa Febos’ “Body Work”
Imagine this. You’re six, and you’re playing in the sand pit arranging piles of grainy earth into neat, abstract pyramids.
The Ineffable, the Unspeakable, and the Inspirational: A Grammar
Neuroscientists tell us that what comes to the retina of the eye is only a part—and not even the largest part—of what we see.