June 30, 2026 On Art United Nations Art Tour By Asha Schechter Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Non-Violence, 1980, bronze, 79 x 44 x 50″ (donated by Luxembourg, 1989). All photographs courtesy of the author. On January 30, 2026, the New York Times published an article with the headline “U.N. Says It’s in Danger of Financial Collapse Because of Unpaid Dues.” The United States owes the lion’s share of those dues—95 percent, totaling about $2.2 billion. Eight days prior, the charter for a new organization called the Board of Peace had been signed in a ceremony at Davos (naturally). The Board of Peace, an invention of Donald Trump’s, was supposedly established to execute the Gaza Peace Plan. Trump has appointed himself chair for life, and charges each country $3 billion in dues for permanent membership. The name, as it appears on official branding materials, is notably not prefaced by the, so, when spoken aloud, it sounds like an expression of ennui, or the title of an early-aughts teen movie about the skateboarding child of a diplomat. The Board of Peace seems designed to replace the United Nations with a more U.S.-centric organization, devoid of even feeble protections to limit U.S. domination of international affairs. This turmoil was the backdrop for an art tour I took at the UN, a guided look at the collection described on the UN’s website as “a combination of artworks, historic objects, and architectural components donated by member states, foundations, and individual donors since 1950.” Our guide was a Greek woman named Regina, who began by rattling off the goals of the UN: peace and security, zero hunger, climate action, inclusion, education, women’s rights, global health, ending poverty, clean energy, disaster relief, et cetera. These, she said, were reflected in the art collection, which was intended to “catch the eye, warm the heart, and light up the imagination.” Read More
June 4, 2026 On Art Idiots: On Munch and von Trier By Karl Ove Knausgaard Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1855–1886), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still unsurpassed. The odd thing is that the painting seemingly came out of nothing: Munch was twenty-one years old when he painted it, he had hardly any education, hardly any experience as a painter, and he painted it on the very outskirts of provincial Europe, in a Kristiania where, only a few decades before, cows could be seen ambling through the streets. Equally odd is the fact that this painting, which marks the beginning of Munch’s artistic career, his first masterpiece, is also an end point: he never again made anything that came close to it. The Sick Child is an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist. He worked on it for a year, adding layer upon layer, then, scraping the paint off, added new layers, scraped them off, as if he were burrowing into something, or toward something. When he exhibited it at the Annual Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania in 1886 he still considered it unfinished, and titled it Study. At the exhibition the painting was ridiculed, people laughed and pointed at it, the newspapers slammed it. Nowadays this is difficult to understand. How could anyone ridicule something so palpably heartfelt and vulnerable, and so existentially threatening, for isn’t it the very image of deep emotion and existential threat? The Sick Child depicts a pale, gaunt, sickly girl propped up against a pillow in bed, her gaze directed at a woman sitting next to her and holding her hand. The woman’s head is bowed, we can’t see her face, only the girl’s. It is full of concern for the woman, who will have to go on with her life. The room is rendered almost without depth, our gaze has no way to travel into it, the surface stops it at every point. The bed, with its greenish covering, looks almost vertical. The walls, also greenish, in places dissolve into vertical, clearly painted stripes. There is a bottle of medicine on a chest of drawers in front of the bed to one side, to the other there is a small table with a half-filled glass. Both objects seem mere suggestions, painted just clearly enough that we can recognize them, but no more. The same applies to the girl’s and the woman’s hands, especially the girl’s one hand lying on the bedcover, it is unfinished, merely suggested, a “hand” rather than a hand. Read More
May 19, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: Sackcloth 1953 By Hal Foster Alberto Burri, Sackcloth 1953, 1953, burlap and thread on canvas, 33 ⅞ x 39 ⅜ inches. Photograph by Hal Foster. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here, and the previous installments here, here, and here. Can a painting still be called a painting if it is made of rough burlap riven with holes and tears? Although most of the gashes in Sackcloth 1953 are patched, stitched, or sewn, some still gape, exposing the canvas underneath, which is painted black and brown. Held together by this support alone, the burlap is also stained and bleached, with blotches that range from light brown and red to pale orange and yellow. Why salvage and repair this nasty piece of fabric at all, unless salvage and repair are somehow the subjects? At the same time, gaps go unsewn, sutures fray, and patches don’t match, all of which suggests the futility of reparation, at least any that purports to be complete. Alberto Burri worked on the painting horizontally, sewing it on a table, before rotating it vertically for us to view on a wall. But the initial orientation is registered in the final one. As we look at the painting, we seem to gaze down on a scoured terrain; patches, holes, and stitches also suggest physical features—a hill, a ravine, a field, a stream, a lake. Landscape is a very common subject in painting, of course, and the dimensions of Sackcloth 1953 suit the genre. Here, though, landscape has become an abstract topography that is tactile as well as visual. Read More
May 12, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: The Blind Man’s Meal By Hal Foster Pablo Picasso, The Blind Man’s Meal, 1903, oil on canvas, 37 ½ x 37 ¼ inches. Photograph by Hal Foster. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here, and the previous installments here and here. The final entry will appear next week. A solitary man sits at a simple table. He wears a blue-gray coat and a blue-gray cap with a dark blue kerchief knotted around his neck. His skin is green. He looms over the table, forearms flat on its blue-brown surface. His torso is long and thin. Although his arms are strong and his neck taut, his chest is sunken. Perhaps he is tubercular as well as blind. Certainly he is poor. Read More
May 5, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: Ice Floes By Hal Foster Claude Monet, Ice Floes, 1893, oil on canvas, 26 x 39 ½ inches, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here and the first installment here. The next two entries will appear later this month. Almost everyone passes right by this Monet at the Met. Unlike the paintings of his iconic Haystack or Rouen Cathedral series, examples of which are nearby, this bluish-white blur is easy to overlook. You have to wait on this picture, attend to it, in order for it to appear at all. Read More
May 1, 2026 On Art When the Confederacy Came to LA By Harmony Holiday Installation view of MONUMENTS, October 23, 2025 to May 3, 2026, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Brick. Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen. This is not a traditional review but a look at the set of myths and the sublimated pursuit of dominance that have made it necessary to mount an exhibition featuring decommissioned Confederate monuments disrupted or forced into deeper layers of disgrace by remix and recontextualization. The result is a humiliation ritual that both targets and empowers white nationalism in the American South, instigating its reactionary temperament just enough to arouse productive tension but not enough to alleviate it or rehabilitate the temperament itself. Since its opening this past October, which came in the wake of the brutal, live-streamed assassination of Charlie Kirk and public fallout that ranged from glee to real mourning to opportunistic purposing of the optics of both grief and outrage, MONUMENTS, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick in Los Angeles, has been an institutional zone wherein real and symbolic clashes between far-right extremism and bourgeois liberal dismay are played out in pantomime. We are all of us characters in this impromptu theater of convoluted archetypes. Paradoxically, in the museum or gallery, ornate propaganda for the Confederacy gains some of the dignity of archaeology. Its monuments become pendulums swinging backward, gathering the momentum that comes from being the subject of protest and outrage, kept at bay and in check by that attention, but not for long. They haunt better there, stalking the mind like hunters in an offseason. Think of Billie Holiday’s tawny tone belting “This year’s crop of kisses are not for me, for I’m still wearin’ last year’s love” or the deceptively whimsical opening line to “Strange Fruit”: “Pastoral scene of the gallant South.” Read More