October 20, 2016
August 19, 2016
Episode 27: On Fire
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, we feature Jonathan Griffin, author of the book On Fire, in conversation with Paper Monument editor Dushko Petrovich. On Fire explores the phenomenon of studio fires and how artists recover in the aftermath.
December 16, 2015
Episode 21: Adjunct Commuter Weekly
This episode of the n+1 podcast goes on the road with Paper Monument co-founding editor Dushko Petrovich to talk about adjunct labor in universities and his new project the Adjunct Commuter Weekly.
March 7, 2014
Sochi 2014
Everyone at the Olympics is special
In hockey, the story of the Sochi Olympics was the shame of the Russians. From the start, even after Ovechkin scored a goal barely a minute into their game against Slovenia, they looked nervous. American commentators joked about Putin’s presence in the stands. Russian commentators did not joke about it. They couldn’t understand why their team looked so ill at ease.
January 6, 2014
Episode 12: Paper Monument
The new episode the n+1 podcast brings interviews about art and art criticism for the release of Paper Monument Number Four. First, an interview with Paper Monument editor Dushko Petrovich and contributors Julian Kreimer and Martha Schwendener to discuss politics and art criticism in the contemporary art world. Then, Chris Kraus joins us for an interview to talk about her recent piece in n+1 Issue 17, “Kelly Lake Store,” art communities, and “social practice.”
About
January 1, 1970
Paper Monument in Chicago, March 4
If you’re in Chicago on Sunday, March 4, come say hello to Paper Monument editors Dushko Petrovich and Roger White at their opening at the Suburban.
November 4, 2011
ARTSCENTER TALKSOURCE
ARTSCENTER TALKSOURCE isn’t just an internet art replay talk show, co-hosted by Roger White and Dushko Petrovich, two of America’s leading art commentators. It’s much, much more. ARTSCENTER TALKSOURCE transports the at-home audience into the gallery. ARTSCENTER TALKSOURCE replays the art, gets inside it, shows how it works in real time. ARTSCENTER TALKSOURCE makes the scene.
January 11, 2011
We Like Your Book
Paper Monument’s first small book, I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette, has just gone into its third printing. We’re impressed, but then again, the book itself is pretty impressive, featuring contributions from thirty-eight artists, critics, curators, and dealers on the sometimes serious, sometimes ridiculous subject of manners in the art world.
July 28, 2010
LA is nice, says Paper Monument
Paper Monument had a party in LA on Saturday—a “big success,” editors Roger White and Dushko Petrovich told us. It was held at Chinatown shop Ooga Booga, with music by the band Dunes and DJ SFV Acid.
October 1, 2005
Interview with Steve Mumford
No military units would consider taking me on as an embedded artist at that time, so I thought I’d better just buy a ticket to Kuwait City and see if I could find a way into Iraq. After a few frustrating days I finally hooked up with two French reporters who gave me ride to Baghdad; there I found a battalion from 3rd ID with an enthusiastic commanding officer who gave me free reign with his platoons.
February 29, 2020
Bring in the Boss
You keep the boss in the back of your mind at all times, don’t you?
In an unwittingly communal effort to highlight the surging popularity of socialism, Warren and Biden and Pete and everyone except Bernie already declared they were not socialists. So how, then, can we be sure that this is a Mike 2020 hat? How does he stand out in a field crowded with centrists and center-leftists? Well, just like with a North Face down jacket—which, incidentally, would also go great with this cap—the branding is on the back. Weirdly, you would only get the message after the hat wearer had passed you by on the street. Is the hat meant to evoke l’esprit de l’escalier?
January 23, 2020
Rise of the Blur
A specter is haunting photojournalism—an actual, visible specter
Because detective shows and soap operas use this blurry-foreground move so regularly, its sudden ubiquity in the news represents a significant shift in register, or even genre, for journalism. Photojournalism has for decades restricted itself to a stark framing of visual facts, never wishing to compromise its evidentiary role in the narration for a more theatrical one. The best news photos deftly capture the drama with a shutter click, but that is also the abiding rule: it either happens in that click, or it doesn’t make it to print.
August 19, 2019
All Thumbs
Punctum, punctum, punctum
July 5, 2018
Check Out the Neymar Rolling Meme
World Cup update
Uruguay vs. Portugal brought us, mercifully, to the point where Ronaldo was also gone. Nothing against either of them, but their presence is such that even having one of them involved means the epic Messi–Ronaldo debate eats up all the air time and “analysis.” Men who know nothing pontificate. Good and evil are spoken of in utter seriousness. 7 percent of the internet is devoted to this debate, so let me take a moment to end it. They are both utterly amazing! And brace yourselves: they are equally amazing, and they are differently amazing. I don’t know why this is so hard for people to accept. There is no way, in a team sport, to bring the issue to further clarity, so I recommend everyone drops this line of debate. Please, take the fact that the universe put them out in the same round as a sign.
January 9, 2013
Small Ads
On Facebook, I take some cheap shots at Sarah Palin and the multibillion-dollar, publicly traded behemoth decides I’d like to see . . . ads promoting Mitt Romney. Missed again, you corporate motherfuckers! says the little voice inside my head. Your marketing will never catch me! Of course, it eventually will. It already kind of does. A fleeting invitation to a gout study snares me. Did I post something fatty?
June 30, 2012
False Nine vs. Real Nine
As a civilian, Balotelli is outlandish. Last year, his white Maserati was impounded twenty-seven times, accumulating £10,000 worth of parking tickets. He also accidentally set his house on fire with firecrackers, was fined a week’s wages for throwing darts at a teammate, and kept turning up unannounced in strange places, including a women’s prison in Brescia (“just fancied having a look”).
March 30, 2011
Football as Before
Before he became famous for headbutting, Zinadine Zidane was actually known for his composure. At Bordeaux, Juventus, and Real Madrid, his hallmarks as a midfielder were Spartan efficiency of movement, incisive passing, and magnetic control of the ball in tight circumstances. Unlike Pele or Maradona and Chrisiano Ronaldo, Zidane wasn’t particularly flashy.
January 7, 2011
Pumpkin MoCA
As evidenced by the tremendous amount of real estate he holds down both here and over in Beacon, no one (of his generation) understood the nature of the large-scale institutional art project as well as Sol LeWitt. What he clearly perceived, and played with impeccably, were its limits. The resulting body of work is so successful precisely because it is so institutional.
November 23, 2010
Double Album
The noun and the verb are both painting, but there isn’t as much peach and silver as suggested. In fact, the best picture is black and white. It’s called Unravel, but it’s the most composed. As with jazz, the gap between the simple title and the unnameable experience can invite reverie. But the other perils of improvisation also abound.
August 20, 2010
Future Sentimental Group
People want to have a new sense of voyeurism, they want a new level. This is something I’m really interested in. We still don’t know how this is going to grow or pop, but we know it isn’t going away. This is very important to me—I want to be in the middle of this. These other people have cracked something fundamental, and that’s what we’re looking for. We want to crack something fundamental.
January 1, 1970
Paper Monument LA launch party
Hello, LA readers. Our sister magazine, Paper Monument, is hosting a launch party for its third issue in your city this weekend.
June 8, 2010
Post What?
Post-critical: We made ourselves so familiar with the past, learned so much about its modes and movements, diligently collected and studied its images, that it made sense, this persistent desire to be judged as if from the omniscient future. We loved the past, and this (always-postponed) ideal critique would finally allow us to merge with it.
May 17, 2010
The Empire of Conversation
The objects didn’t literally speak, but they always started conversations—down at the pub, in the cafeteria at the Courtauld, even the one our visitor was having now, in his head. The Victorian idea of a conversation piece had been reborn as an artwork that promoted itself. This was happening all over, but it occurred with a special fervor and skill in London, which didn’t seem coincidental to our visitor.
April, May, June
An Art Chronicle
If you want to know how we ended up getting seduced by a woman in a plastic Viking hat chatting away through an already-encrusted bloody nose while holding a piece of Styrofoam cheese in an emergency room parking lot, or if you’re wondering why we fell in love as she cheese-guitared Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” on a mountaintop perch—well, that part is pretty hard to explain.
July 10, 2006
Death’s Sky Blue Bag
Marvin Gates Symposium, Part I
If the Grim Reaper were alive today, it seems he would be wearing sneakers. As the faceless city waits for cabs and hops in cars, he’s busy. He’s running around, jaw dropped—is he about to speak? Both his fists are clenched: one swings up in an even-paced trot, while the other grips a baby-blue case with fingerless gloves. What does he keep in there?
April 25, 2006
A Practical Avant-Garde
Toward a manifesto
The avant-garde isn’t what it used to be. Our sprawling culture industry busies itself mainly in locating things in the network presented by the relatively recent past. Everybody is described as the love child of so-and-so and so-and-so, so everybody gets called neo this or neo that, unless the parents are divorced—then they get called post.
December 7, 2005
Gunpowder Empire
Ed Ruscha Symposium, Part III
Like any good hitter, Ruscha swings with precision. He has a smooth stroke, which often gets called “cool,” and is often misunderstood as dependable. But Ruscha swings at a lot—palindromes, gas stations, entire empires—and so he occasionally strikes out. The abstract nouns Truth and Hope, set on faded teal and ice blue, are too bland to trouble me visually, or philosophically.
July 14, 2005
The Icon Emerging
An Art Chronicle
In 1968, the Democratic Convention broke heads, so Guston broke out. Nixon swelled with lying, Guston drew him that way. Guston said he didn’t just want his paintings to sit on the wall. The world was horrible, and the art world was being polite. So Guston invited hairy limbs to the party. What are those limbs doing? Can anyone explain their behavior?
June 17, 2005
The State of Painting
Part IV of "Greater New York' in Five Parts
Steve Mumford’s watercolors from Iraq are, paradoxically, the most topical and the most stylistically out of sync works in the show, which might explain their placement on the walls of the hallway near the staff offices. An impressive corridor of images that Winslow Homer or John Singer Sergeant could have painted shows us details from our occupation of Iraq.
Art Chronicle: Graphic Novels
A German friend asked me if graphic novels were erotic. I said, “No, they’re neurotic.” So neurotic they’re even appearing on English-department syllabi. But their graphic nature has been overlooked. Drawing is suddenly making a comeback in literature, where they know their Kafka and Classics Illustrated, but maybe not Daumier or Saul Steinberg.
Art Chronicle; or, The Icon Emigrating
Over the years, images replaced paintings, and objects replaced sculptures. But painting was quietly both an image and an object.