JACK HEMS/COURTESY WHITE CUBE
Big Shows
Jason Farago takes an early stroll through the Whitney Biennial still being installed in advance of its opening next week—and likes what he sees. (A pretty picture of boxes by Larry Bell intrigues indeed.) [The New York Times]
A blockbuster Vermeer exhibition has overloaded systems and led to “chaos at the Louvre”—with the specter of a staff strike as a result. [The Art Newspaper]
Christopher Knight takes to the parched, evocative wilds of California for a review of “Desert X.” [The Los Angeles Times]
Buildings
Architecture critic Martin Filler is no fan of the new World Trade Center in New York, a “vast flop” that has been “hampered to a shameful degree by the intransigent self-interest of both individuals and institutions.” [The New York Review of Books]
On Mike Kelley’s last major artwork: a house in Michigan with a basement that is much more than a basement in the end. [The New York Times/T Magazine]
Russia
See some futuristic visions for a Moscow that never was. [The Guardian]
Fertile, free-flowing years before the forced aesthetics of “Socialist Realism” took over in Soviet Russia are the focus of a show at the Royal Academy in London—”a big, dynamic, disturbing exhibition, a blaze of artistic hope undermined by suffering, death, and despair.” [The New York Review of Books]
Feminist Perspectives
K-HOLE operative Emily Segal gives a steely read to Cat Marnell’s live-wire memoir How To Murder Your Life in the pages of Texte Zur Kunst. [Texte Zur Kunst]
The new book See Red Women’s Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974–1990 surveys activities by an English women’s collective on the public proclamation front. [The Paris Review]
Droppin’ Science
Pitchfork goes all-in with reviews of four albums by the Notorious B.I.G. on the 20th anniversary of the great rapper’s death. [Pitchfork]
John Stossel thinks Trump should stop funding the arts because it’s bad for art. One wonders about the ingenuousness of his argument. [Fox News]
Misc.
A $25,000 taco? A $25,000 taco! [Yahoo News]
Sticky tabs fail to keep a Rembrandt safe in a mishap sure to leave insurers none too pleased. [The Onion]