I am halfway through Louis Menand’s The Free World, a fascinating history of postwar culture that makes new connections on every page. I’m also reading for the first time Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars, her classic 1929 book about Mexican art
I never tire of looking at the work of German painters Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen (the last of whom is still alive and making great work). I can usually find something positive in any artistic development, but I make an exception for NFTs, which seem visually dull and ethically toxic. I also could do without celebrities, politicians and their offspring publicly taking up the art of painting.
Take more chances. Don’t be afraid of criticism or rejection. Make friends with more writers.
I am continually inspired by Phong Bui, a Vietnamese refugee artist who created The Brooklyn Rail, an indispensable monthly magazine that is also a great Beuysian social sculpture. I am also inspired every day by the paintings of Heather Bause Rubinstein, who I have the great luck to be married to.
I admire how poet Claudia Rankine inserted images of artworks into her book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). As for art and music, I encourage everyone to listen to Promises, a 2021 album in which jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and electronic musician Floating Points team up with the London Symphony Orchestra in compositions inspired by the paintings of Julie Mehretu.
Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based poet and art critic whose numerous books include Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002 (Hard Press Editions), The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now) and The Miraculous (Paper Monument). He edited the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (Hard Press Editions). The Miraculous has been translated into French by Marcel Cohen and published by Editions Greges. From 1997 to 2007 he was a senior editor at Art in America, where he continues to be a contributing editor. He is currently professor of critical studies at the University of Houston School of Art. In 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2010, his blog, The Silo won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
