Search View Archive

Billions for Brooklyn—No Questions Asked

By David Vine

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

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.

Art In Conversation

Fred Tomaselli

By Chris Martin

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.

Art In Conversation

Marina Abramović

By Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey

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

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.

Matthew Ritchie

By Jennifer Coates

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.

Film In Conversation

Jonas Mekas

By Raimund Abraham

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

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.

InTranslation

See the current issue »

ArtSeen

Table of Contents

Local

Express

Art

ArtSeen

Books

Music

Dance

Film

Theater

Fiction

Poetry

ADVERTISEMENTS
close

The Brooklyn Rail

WINTER 2003

All Issues
Close ×
The Brooklyn Rail

Sign up for the Brooklyn Rail newsletter

Get notified about upcoming live conversations with artists and when the next issue of the Rail drops.

Sign up