Plus: Libya; Sara Flores; Pope.L; Andy Warhol
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Today in The New York Review of Books, Alma Guillermoprieto looks for the real Frida Kahlo; Wolfram Lacher scrutinizes the Trump administration’s strange peace plan for Libya; Gabriella Lachetti looks at Sara Flores’s art; Coco Fusco looks at Pope.L’s art; and, from the archives, Robert Mazzocco on Andy Warhol.
The face that sold a million mugs returned to museums and the operatic stage this spring, as if there was a yearning to reconnect with the real Frida Kahlo.
For six years a fragile stalemate has kept Libya’s conflict frozen. A new US-brokered mediation effort risks upending that balance.
Sara Flores adapts the ancient designs of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe of Peru into large, pattern-based paintings.
Pope.L, best known for his performance art, also made drawings and paintings animated by his sense of the absurd and his concern for the marginalized.
Free from the Archives
Today is Andy Warhol’s ninety-eighth birthday. In the Review’s April 24, 1969, issue, Robert Mazzocco wrote the magazine’s first appraisal of the artist’s work. While he was rather dubious about Warhol’s merits, his frustrations sat cheek by jowl with a distinct excitement, the kind of qualified fascination that Warhol must have loved: a “sublime sphinx show”; “piquant, I suppose”; “so blank it suggests the revelatory” “baffling redundancy”; “decadent and lewd”; “sophistication largely through default.”
“It is often said that so much that is decadent and lewd meets in Warhol and of course that’s so, and not so. Warhol is really like a depraved Parson Weems dreaming of Andy Hardy. He’s so American, as American as Consumer Reports and Flash Gordon serials and church socials, and yet so pointedly strange. So bland, yet weathered. As accommodating as a teacher’s pet, but how prodigiously knowing, what a fugleman.”
“Trump’s true innovation as an American authoritarian is not the profligate abuse of emergency powers but the full-on castration of a Congress that allowed him to do it.”
“The DNC is full of scheming and plotting, alliances and rivalries. But the turmoil tends to the internecine. The crucial work that the party undertakes in a decentralized political system—informally coordinating across all the politicians, donors, interest groups, and activists jostling for influence—largely happens elsewhere, whether at conferences ostensibly devoted to new progressive ideas or policy agendas, or at discreet confabs where donors and pols rub shoulders.”
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