Robert Bielat, In Memorium
The artist and my friend Robert Bielat died unexpectedly on December 13, 2018 at age 69. At the time of his death, he was preparing for a spring show at AtomArt in Ferndale. His partner Veronica...
View ArticleOde to Joy
Recently, artist Mary Fortuna published an album of photographs on Facebook of the retirement party held in 2006 for long-time Detroit News art critic Joy Hakanson Colby. At the time, Nick Sousanis,...
View ArticleTo the Vector the Spoils
Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? is a sequel to McKenzie Wark’s highly regarded 2004 book A Hacker Manifesto. Like its predecessor, Capital Is Dead surveys the mental, social, and physical...
View ArticleThe New Economics of True Wealth: A Review of Plenitude by Juliet B. Schor
Before founding The New School online publication Public Seminar, sociologist Jeffrey C. Goldfarb put out a precursor titled Deliberately Considered. Through Jeff, who was my dissertation advisor, I...
View ArticleOn Pynchon and Monk for International Book Day
For International Book Day, April 23, 2020, Cary Loren of The Book Beat asked me to do a kind of "Desert Island" thing. I focused on the one book and the one record that I couldn't live without. I want...
View ArticleFirst Tragedy, Then Farce, Then What?
This review was posted on Popmatters on June 29, 2020. * * *One of the most often-cited quotations of Karl Marx is a riff on the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel that all world-historical facts and personages...
View ArticleNotes on Invisible Man
I was asked by Cary Loren of the Book Beat to write something about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which was this year's WDET Book Club summer read. It was published on the store's Backroom blog on...
View ArticleLadies Sing the Blues
One of the great experiences of my time in the graduate program in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research was a class I took with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall on representations...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Louisses
One of the great experiences of my time in the graduate program in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research was a class I took with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall on representations...
View ArticleIgnorance, Fear, and Democracy in America
PopMatters published my review of the new Library of America volume on Richard Hofstadter today, which also happens to be US Constitution Day, as well as the ninth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.* *...
View ArticleDownsizing Democracy
In 2002, I reviewed this book for PopMatters. The book by political scientists Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsburg (no relation to Notorious RBG, of blessed memory) takes note of judicial and...
View ArticlePopMatters Best Nonfiction of 2020
In December 2020, PopMatters published a list of the best nonfiction books of the year. Three of the books I reviewed were included in the list. I don't write much, but apparently what I do write seems...
View ArticleDawoud Bey's American Project
My review of the 50-year retrospective of the work of photographer Dawoud Bey, who College for Creative Studies awarded an honorary doctorate to a few years back."Dawoud Bey's American Project,"...
View ArticleNew Woman Behind the Camera
I wrote a review of The New Woman Behind the Camera for PopMatters. The exhibition surveys the work of midcentury women photographers now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveling to...
View ArticleRIP Peter Williams
Peter Williams (1952-2021) Photo: Kathy F. AtkinsonOn August 19, we lost one of the great Detroit painters, Peter Williams. He had been in and out of the hospital recently and this time he didn't make...
View ArticleFear Factor, Revisted: On the 20th Anniversary of September 11
This Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center that set off the 20-year war in Afghanistan (with a side trip to Iraq) from which the United States has theoretically been...
View ArticleAmy Taubin Interviews Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes's documentary The Velvet Underground screening at Outer Limits Lounge, 21 October 2021 The October 2021 issue of Artforum (which I wrote for in the late 80s/early 90s) has this interview...
View ArticleYaris Varoufakis's Novel "Another Now" Presages and Contests Mark...
This review of Yaris Varoufakis's speculative novel Another Now was published by PopMatters on November 8, 2021. * * *Almost immediately upon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on October 28...
View ArticleFuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War
The Orroral Valley Fire, Australia, January 2020 (Photo: Nick D, CC BY-SA 4.0) I was asked by the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America to review this book on climate change by Syracuse...
View ArticleGrace Lee Boggs's Next American Revolution
In 2011, I wrote of review of Grace Lee Boggs's book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, for the current events blog Deliberately Considered, published by...
View ArticleLL Bean Double-Coding
I got the new LL Bean Summer Men's catalog in the mail recently and had to do a double take. At a quick glance, it appeared to portray an interracial gay couple holding hands and walking their dog on...
View ArticleShane MacGowan (1957-2023)
Shane MacGowan, Moscow, 2010 (Image: Redageg, CC-BY-SA 3.0)Shane MacGowan, genius bard of Éire, has died at the age of 65. When my daughter was an undergrad at U-M, I took her to see the Pogues....
View ArticleThe Street Portraits of Carlos Diaz
Photographer Carlos Diaz approached me a while back about writing something for a show he was mounting at the Detroit Historical Museum of images he took in 1984 during the Detroit Tigers run up to...
View ArticleRichard Serra (1938 - 2024)
Richard Serra at the Detroit Institute of Arts, October 28, 1982. (Photo: Vince Carducci)RIP sculptor Richard Serra. One of my first pieces as an art writer was on Serra, who had come to the Detroit...
View ArticleMary Gillis: Studio Views
This past February I was asked to write an introduction for an exhibition at Gladden Space, a new gallery in Lansing, of work by the artist Mary Gilles. I first met Mary many years ago when she had a...
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