Activity

I find myself wondering if there is a relationship between the graffiti and the tattoos. Teenagers here are extravagantly inked and they talk about it in a particular way. As a gesture of reclamation, as if their bodies were not theirs before. These are people, after all, on whom it has been impres…

The screen in the cafe is playing a music video by Zayn Malik, the half-Pakistani singer from Bradford, England, propelled to stardom by a TV talent show. The video begins with Malik gazing wearily at the baying paparazzi gathered to catch a shot of him as he emerges from his limousine on a rainy n…

Today, Grigny is a grimy assemblage of 1970s housing blocks. New facades on the schools fly the flags of France and the European Union, and are painted with edifying quotations from great white men, but they are masks for falling-down classrooms. Doctors do not want to work there, and the lone publ…

‘Is it possible to make a work of art that is not embodied in an object?’

A ponderous silence.

‘Well?’ said Delia.

‘Is it the artist’s job to answer questions, or to ask them?’

In a classroom in Manhattan on a rainy day, my perception of art was changed forever. Vito Acconci’s pedagogy …

[...] His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when she and I sat down behind them.