Director and writer Lin Hixson and performer, writer, and dramaturg Matthew Goulish, both based in Chicago, spent 20 years working with the company Goat Island. That company developed and performed nine unique pieces over 20 years in locations around the world. After a two-year process of marking the end, the company disbanded.

Artists are concerned with the question of audience—the relationship between objects and/or process and audience. They are also concerned with art’s ability to mirror the sociopolitical reality and, in fact, to even transform it.

In Marina Abramović’s current retrospective at MoMA, Abramović performs every day, all day, for the entire duration of the exhibit. Visitors are invited to sit with the artist, across a table and stare into her eyes. I have already seen this exhibit three times and will surely go again, but I will not sit with Abramović.

Shirin Neshat’s new full-length feature Women without Men will be shown at the 66th Venice Film Festival (September 2–12, 2009) and the Toronto International Film Festival (September 10–19, 2009). One evening in July, Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and Publisher Phong Bui, paid a visit to the SoHo loft which she shares with her partner, the artist Shoja Azari, to watch the near-final version of the film before its last minute revisions.

On the occasion of the Columbia Alumni Association Forum, September 22, 2007, organized by Columbia University at La Bourse, historic site of the Paris Stock Exchange, Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Arts, spoke with Orhan Pamuk.

I met Marcia in the late ’80s when I first started writing about art and artists, and in Marcia I found a wonderful friend.