Featured Articles

Billions for Brooklyn—No Questions Asked

by David Vine

Local

A half-century ago, Robert Moses audaciously promised that his plans for a downtown Civic Center would be "to Brooklyn what the great cathedrals and opera plazas are to European cities." Today, the borough’s leading developers’ promises are just as inflated, with visions of Flatbush Avenue as Brooklyn’s Champs Elysées and the arch at Grand Army Plaza as its Arc de Triomphe.

Will There Be Another FDR?

by Theodore Hamm

Express

The prevailing wisdom among left-liberal critics is that the Democratic Party needs to restore the New Deal to the center of its agenda. With an economy teetering on the brink of depression, a government abdicating any responsibility for the well-being of society’s least well-off, and an opposition party groping for direction, it does seem like the early 1930s all over again.

In Conversation

Fred Tomaselli

by Chris Martin

Art

The Brooklyn Rail visited Fred Tomaselli’s studio in the heart of Williamsburg on a cold November afternoon. Up one flight of stairs off Driggs Avenue, the studio is modest and efficient, like a serious medieval workshop. Three new paintings lined one wall.

In Conversation

Marina Abramović

by Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey

Art

Marina Abramović may be best known for her historically pivotal performances of the 1970s. In 1974, for example, she created the now famous "Rhythm O," where she stood in a gallery space for six hours, leaving instructions to those who entered to use one of 72 objects placed on the table on her person in any way they wished.

Matta, 1912 – 2002

by Phong Bui

Art

Probably one of the very last remaining Surrealist artists, Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren, otherwise known as Matta, died on Saturday at his home in Tarquinia, Italy, on November 23rd, a day after an opening of his new works in Rome.

ArtSeen

Matthew Ritchie

by Jennifer Coates

ArtSeen

Matthew Ritchie is a visionary thinker who makes decorative, diagrammatic paintings where pictorial information spills from its rectangular boundaries and commandeers real space. In his latest show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Matthew Ritchie: After Lives, he sought to detail a transformational cycle that encompassed birth, death, solidity, and liquidity.

Jonas Mekas

by Raimund Abraham

Film

Jonas Mekas: I think I need to make an introduction to this conversation. We are here on the roof of a building at 32 Second Avenue. Formerly a courthouse, now it is Anthology Film Archives’ headquarters. The occasion for this conversation is our need to construct adjacent to this building—in a space that is twelve feet by one hundred feet—a library for our paper materials, of which we have a lot.

Shitty Mickey

by John Reed

Fiction

Recently, I was afforded the opportunity of interviewing Mickey Mouse at his Chelsea art complex. In a spartan loft of 6,000 square feet, the Marlon Brando of the mouse world sat in a warm buttermilk bath and sipped papaya smoothies (evidently excellent for the bowels) while we discussed his most recent body of work, which surrounded us.

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