By: Peggy Nelson

I know we only just met, but don’t worry, it’s science. [I Rub My Duckie vibrator image courtesy sfgate.com] I mean vibrators, of course. It’s great how flexible our metaphors are, how they vibrate with […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Attention gets a lot of attention these days. Mostly as currency, as in, how to make paying attention pay off. Switch one value proposition for another, dissolve everything in the universal $olvent. I’m going to […]

By: HILOBROW

HiLobrow.com is not opposed to the “guest blogger.” But it’s a waxy concept, sticky and vexing, isn’t it? Guests have been deployed by too many blogs for everything from vacation coverage to boredom-bandaging. Uncanny guests […]

By: Lynn Peril

She had oodles of cash, acres of style, and eventually her very own 18th-century palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, where she slept in a sterling silver bed designed by Alexander Calder. There was heartache — […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The one piece of fine-art-inspired kitsch I’ve been craving ever since I first heard of it is a long-unavailable shower curtain reproducing “The Large Glass” (“The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even”) by MARCEL […]

By: Patrick Cates

In the Orwellian year of 1984, my father took me to the Centre Pompidou and exposed my 10-year-old sponge of a brain to its first contemporary art collection and, therein, to a towering agglomeration of […]

By: Joe Alterio

Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist RUBE GOLDBERG (1883-1970) pulls string (A) which activates bellows. Bellows (B) compresses, inflating balloon (C). Expanding balloon causes glass of water (D) to tip, soaking sponge (E). Sponge, due to increased weight […]

By: Lynn Peril

The name MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (1904-71) conjures up an image: a woman with a camera balanced atop one of the chromed, art-deco eagles that guard the upper reaches of New York’s Chrysler Building. Though she didn’t […]

By: Peggy Nelson

EGON SCHIELE (1890-1918) was the best thing about the blizzard I spent in Vienna. I had gone to see the remnants of a nervous splendor, expecting well-behaved aesthetic souvenirs from a once-hypermodern past. But when […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Known best for his Flag (1954-5) and Map (1961), JASPER JOHNS (born 1930) along with his friend and one-time lover Robert Rauschenberg, applied gestural painting and bold, unblended color to everyday images and objects. Focusing […]

By: Peggy Nelson

A conceptual artist, self-inventor, and master of materials who constructed his strongest work out of intangibles, JOSEPH BEUYS (1921-1986) was our postcard deity in art school. His sense of the absurd combined with his high […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Choreography is just an idea — the execution is the manifestation.

By: Matthew Battles

BORN IN 1900, German artist Gerd Arntz designed a pattern language for life in the twentieth century. His prints and designs were intended to further the purposes of a socialist world even as they dreamt […]

By: Matthew Battles

The art of Thomas Doyle is at once inviting and unsettling. Miniature tableaux under glass, his pieces have the quirky, lilliputian charm of the model railroad, the dollhouse, and the museum diorama. But upon further […]

By: Matthew Battles

Thomas Horvath’s kites are like every kite you’ve ever seen, and like no kite you’ve ever seen. They’re what kites dream of when they lie sleeping in a tangle of string at the bottom of […]