Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in orde...

Sun Ra (1914-1993) – self-proclaimed visionary extraterrestrial of the "Angel Race", prophetic jazz band leader and composer, and lyrical proponent of Afro-futurism – was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century music. Though many of...

"Afterall" is a journal of art, context, and inquiry that offers in-depth consideration of the work of contemporary artists from around the world, along with essays that set the work in a broader context. Articles on art history and critical theory a...

Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria's Secret and "America's Next Top Model" to the snapshots we post on Facebook and Twitter, our culture is fixated on the pose, the state of existing simultaneously as artifice and the real thing. In thi...

Contemporary artist Allison Smith's diverse creative practice critically engages with popular forms of historical reenactment through a variety of media, including sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and photography. Focusing on the handmade and performat...

The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist's studio. Examples abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever si...

In this lucid and insightful essay, renowned linguist Roy Harris reflects on the early nineteenth-century doctrine of "art for art's sake". This was attacked by Proudhon and Nietzsche, but defended by Theophile Gautier and E. M. Forster. It influence...

Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture,...

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism – of Pollock, Miro, and Matisse – has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic o...

Throughout the vast interior of the United States, contemporary artists are responding to the world around them and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name that first appeared last year in the Nether...