"All blogs must pass away." Okay, apologies to the spirit of George Harrison for that one, but it sums up the purpose of today's post ? to lay "Looking Around" to rest. I started this blog in early 2007 as a way to get beyond the weekly newsmagazine format I usually work in and to [...]

 The director Tim Burton doesn't just make enchantingly loony movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. He also makes enchantingly loony paintings and drawings, which he's been scribbling away at since his suitably alienated childhood in Burbank, California. This week the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a big [...]

 They tell us the Great Recession is in retreat, though it may not feel that way if you're unemployed. Even if it is, on the way out the door it took down a project I was looking forward to. Earlier this week the University of California at Berkeley announced that it was giving up on [...]

 We got news this morning of the death of Jeanne-Claude, the artist and creative partner of Christo. They are of course the husband-and-wife team who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, ran a vast curtain fence for miles across the northern California landscape and created the completely enchanting New York City project called The Gates. She [...]

 Actually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word "Minimalism" as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and '80s, when he was at the height of his influence in American fiction. In this week's Time I [...]

 Okay, not the movie ?  but the podcast!

 Last Friday, at the damp tail end of a very wet week in New York, I made it over to Alice Tully Hall to catch a collaboration between the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the Berlin-based, South African artist Robin Rhode. Rhode is best known for short films and videos that owe an (acknowledged) [...]

 The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a big new show devoted to the Bauhaus, the great 20th-century forcing ground of modernism in architecture and design. So I reviewed it in the new issue of Time.

 The New Museum in New York is getting spanked quite a bit lately for its upcoming show devoted to the contemporary art collection of one of its own trustees, the Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou. Tyler Green on his blog Modern Art Notes has been out there aggressively over the last few weeks attacking the museum's [...]