Art
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Writers Respond to Art
A new exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum mixes visual art with writing: “Storylines” is about the resurgence of narrative in the visual arts, but it is also about how writers still love to write about the things artists make. In…
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Paper Trumpets #25: Abstract vs. Accident
If you tell yourself you’re going to work in an abstract style, is that too premeditated? I wonder if abstract is just another word for accidental.
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Street Art as Literature
In Street Messages, German photographer Nicholas Ganz compiles photographs of messages in public spaces, illustrating the literary side of the global street art movement—he calls it “a new, modern form of poetry.” Slate provides a sampling of some of the…
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Judging by the Cover
Covers not only stage an interaction between word and image, printed matter and visual representation, they also broker various connections among reader, designer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. Using Peter Mendelsund’s amazing books Cover and What We See When We Read…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Rigoberto González
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Rigoberto González about his new book Our Lady of the Crossword, cover image censorship, and the BP oil disaster.
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A Library in an Abyss
A Swedish artist has converted an old mining shaft into a library that disappears into an endless abyss. The library is actually a sculpture, part of a 55-piece show, Sculpture by the Sea, located in Denmark. Colossal takes a look…
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Choose Your Own Cover Art
It’s well-known by the literary crowd that authors don’t get to choose the artwork for their book covers. Except when they do, as in the case of Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, who convinced her publisher…
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The Art of the Matter
Language is a shape-shifting thing. For some, it is purely the written word, and for others, it is movement, color, texture, light. In its art-themed Sunday Book Review, the New York Times explores how five artists react to five different…
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Printing Out All Humanity’s Knowledge
Wikipedia hopes to one day contain all of mankind’s (literally, mankind’s) knowledge in a singular repository. Artist Michael Mandiberg decided to create a hard copy and start printing out the online encyclopedia—all 7,600 volumes of it. The New York Times…
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Song of the Day: “Sunday Candy”
In an interview with XXL magazine in 2014, Chance the Rapper pointed out the complex relationship between rap music and profits. He argued: “I don’t think selling [songs] is the right way to do it. It’s more about spreading it……
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Examining Culture
Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its…