Listening In: Olivier Conan, The Soul of Barbès

By Scott Gutterman

OCT 2020 | Music

I’ve sometimes puzzled over what people mean when they say, “be fully present.” But my nights at Barbès often provided a natural version of that phrase. It was like a literal expression of that beautiful Rumi line, “I have fallen into the place where everything is music.”

Susan Bernofsky’s Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

By Cigdem Asatekin

JUL-AUG 2021 | Books

Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale University Press, 2021) is an affectionate, precise piece of writing that illustrates a man of complexities both personal and professional. It is an intimate portrait of an artist, soul-crushing in its realism, with all its valor and rigor.

Tempo e Relazione (Time and Relation)*

By Paolo Fresu

SEPT 2021 | Critics Page

A sudden suspension of my inhabitancy gave birth to new relationships between space and time in a spasmodic search for the luogo dell’anima (soul’s space). Enclosed in our homes, the “walls of discovery” became unprecedented spaces where we saw objects that reminded us of ancient journeys into the world and moments lived in the past. We rediscovered music records that we had not listened to in a long time, and we consumed books that, perhaps, we had read thirty years ago, or that we had never even browsed through.

Martha Diamond: 1980-1989

By Nina Wolpow

FEB 2021 | ArtSeen

Such a feather-thin line between fear and delight, that which sucks the soul and that which saves it, is patently New York, and by the transitive property I have realized, patently Martha Diamond.