If society no longer reliably yields a consistent aesthetic framework, and if even the immediate sensations of our own minds can no longer be trusted, how can we hope to reach the inner truth of an artwork?

maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.

It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another.

They’re explicit pictures, and in a world so entirely scrubbed clean of transgression, any sense of naughtiness is its own form of pleasure. Dainty feet and hands poke out in flirty little kicks, one appendage in front of the trompe l'œil frame, the other receding behind. The effect is not unlike a peep show.

We are often so resistant to directors taking the wheel, balking at the faintest hint of directorial domination over the audience — in this case, the director’s use of our bodies against us, manipulating us into identifying with someone whom our moral code rejects.

It’s not true that the world is ending — if anything, it already has. And yet life continues, alive in its death. These thoughts — speculations — give a perfunctory account of the work of the late painter and poet Manoucher Yektai, a member of the New York School whose first solo show in the city since 1984 opened at Karma two weeks ago.

It was a time of mass shootings, Paris Hilton, boys playing games that looked like war on their consoles and soldiers waging war that looked like video games from drone centers.

There is a richness in color and fullness of form in these works that drew me into them immediately, and held me there. Within them, colors and shapes seem to crumble and grind together, the complexions plow through each other and themselves.

In the world of Donda, West wants to treat pop culture as a religion, a place where sinners (abusers, lawbreakers, and killers) have the opportunity for redemption if they want it.

Hugo Skarstedt reviews Sanya Kantarovsky’s “Recent Faces” at Luhring Augustine Tribeca

pablo lopez reviews his own new book of poetry, out now from Anonymous Energy.

“I have yet to arrive / I will never arrive / in the center of everything is the poem / intact sun / inescapable night.”

“I have been wrong before, god of syntax / and understatement, god of slips in silk / and polyester, god of the laboratory, god of newsprint / and sunscreen”

The layered surface cascades into itself as quickly as it interrupts itself. It vibrates like a field of electricity, full of chaos and psychedelic apparitions, and yet is held together by an arresting unity which appears to emerge at once from above and below — that is, it appears as calculated as it does spontaneous.

Ioanna Kostopoulou reviews Genese Grill’s translation of Robert Musil’s Theater Symptoms

For Anvil and Rose 12, Inspector Watt returns with reviews of books from Paul Celan (tr. Pierre Joris), Jean Daive (on Celan), Alen Hamza, Lara Mimosa Montes, and a COVID anthology edited by Alice Quinn.

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Herman Van den Reeck reviews books from Rosebud Ben-Oni, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, Andres Cerpa, Andrew Levy, and Jackie Wang.

“We hear the intuitive Bloom, the open and receptive reader, the brooder and fabulous conversation partner, talking and chuckling, searching and scowling; we see him rubbing his brow and thinking aloud…”

In this latest Anvil and Rose, Inspector Watt reviews books by Agustín Guambo, David Lehman, J. Michael Martinez, Maureen N. McLane, and Chelsey Minnis.

Adam Morris reviews Padma Viswanathan’s new translation of São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos. “The novel is at once a merciless satire of social class in postcolonial Brazil, and a sensitivity reader’s worst nightmare.“