#covid-19-art

#covid-19-art

"It's bizarre to watch people in this way - even in gay cruising areas you wouldn't stare at other bodies this intensely. Now, whenever I go to a concert, especially at the Berliner Philharmonie with its encircling seating, my gaze hovers over the audience as well as the stage."

Censorship strips innocence from the young and kindness from the elderly. It discourages people from valuing justice, fostering selfishness instead.

Gay dance clubs, besides offering sweaty, blissful spaces to let loose, served as safe havens during the darkest days of the crisis. Places where the LGBTQ community gathered for emotional support, to share vital information, and to raise money for AIDS groups like ACT UP, GMHC, and amfAR.

The Duchamp exhibition at MoMA is encyclopedic, thought-provoking, and sometimes surprising. It spans the entire sixth floor and invites viewers to engage deeply with his work.

When the Academy Award Nominations were announced late last month, you could be forgiven for thinking they were lifetime achievement awards. In the Best Supporting Actor category, 74-year-old Stellan Skarsgård is competing against 73-year-old Delroy Lindo. (Sean Penn, at 65, and Benicio Del Toro, at 58, also in the category, are mere babes.) Amy Madigan, 75, is up for Best Supporting Actress. One of the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees is in their sixties, and one of the Best Original Screenplay nominees is in his seventies.

As theschool's student newspaper The Sun Star reported, undergraduate student Graham Granger was arrested for criminal mischief after masticating at least 57 of the 160 images that had been carefully arranged by fine arts student Nick Dwyer. The incident was an eyebrow-raising illustration of the collective exhaustion with being surrounded by the outputs of generative AI, a fierce debate that has gripped the art world.

Memes have become the clearest and most direct language of digital culture: condensed fragments of reality that synthesize the complexity of the present and circulate at the same speed as a society surrendered to hyperstimulation. From the Dancing Baby of the 1990s to the endless templates of X, Instagram, or TikTok, memes have evolved from simple ephemeral jokes to veritable systems for decoding the world, semiotic capsules that allow us to process the political, the social, and the intimate.

I, too, have been having difficulty conjuring up visions of a better future either for myself or in general. I posted this insight on social media in the final throes of 2025, and received many responses. A lot of respondents agreed they felt like they were just existing, encased in a bubble of the present tense, the road ahead foggy with uncertainty.

mobile phones were far from universal and our social lives were mostly physical and local. In the 25 years since, technology has changed how we live in profound ways. Most people check their phone within minutes of waking and return to it on average 186 times a day. Computers and the systems that sit behind them mediate every aspect of modern life, shaping how we move through the world.

Recently, the internet has been awash with stories and commentary related to Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes, many of which are saturated with graphic and disturbing details. Some social media influencers appear to even be counting on Epstein-related content to increase their reach. Not everyone should consume this kind of material, however. When engaging with the Epstein coverage in particular or with graphic news stories in general, some people may be at an increased risk for re-traumatization or vicarious trauma. These include:

Researchers tracked 355 adults over 13 days using daily diary surveys and found that professional artists tend to experience negative emotions the morning after their most creative days, even though creativity, while in the process of making art, reliably improves their moment-to-moment feeling states.

As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.

With most of us, 90 minutes of reminiscing wouldn't make for scintillating theater. Gert Boyle, as played by Wendy Westerwelle, is the exception to that rule. The late Gert came to fame when she took the reins of Columbia Sportswear after her husband's death in 1970 and also became the "One Tough Mother," with gray hair and glasses, of its comedic '80s and '90s ad campaigns. In one, she put her son, Tim, through a carwash to test the durability of a coat.