The street is littered with chairs and traffic barriers. The sky is full of advertisements. Cabs have given way to pedestrians and somehow there’s more room to maneuver in Times Square?
There’s something a bit misty about this photo of the five-block stretch of Broadway that’s now closed to cars to create a pedestrian mall. Tourists and curious locals can finally stop in the middle of the intersection, safely, and do what they’ve always wanted to do in Manhattan: watch soda ads repeat forever on jumbotron monitors.
In a review of the book Let’s See by Peter Schjeldahl, critic R.C. Baker said, “Schjeldahl avoids the jargon that lends so much art criticism the charm of a physics dissertation”(42). This praise highlights a key concern for art criticism since the 1970s: the pretentious vocabulary and highly specialized usage so common in theory based [...]
In the title story of J.C. Hallman’s first collection of short fiction The Hospital for Bad Poets (Milkweed, May 2009), rescuers hospitalize a novice writer who had collapsed halfway through writing a bad poem. His treatment: one week under observation with a guard stationed at his door. His diagnosis: “chronic acuteness.”
Most of Hallman’s collection is [...]