Arts + Culture

Debbie Millman|Audio

Ellen Lupton

An interview with Ellen Lupton — writer, educator, designer and a Curator of Contemporary Design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Robert Brownjohn and The Big Idea

Left: Robert Brownjohn. Right: Liberace. There's an essay on Liberace by art critic Dave Hickey that's so full of vivid insight that it persuaded me, on a recent trip to the US, to visit the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. Amongst other …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Civilian Typography: The Power and The Fury

Left: Cover of Spoiled, Tom Varisco, 2005; Right: Photograph by Steph Goralnik, 2005.John Updike once wrote that the "itch" to make dark marks on white paper is shared by writers and artists. As for designers, that same itch translates to …

Julie Lasky|Slideshows

Edward Hopper, Village Person

An acquaintance of mine teaches at New York University's School of Social Work. Not long ago, while I was visiting her in the department's Greek Revival mansion at 1 Washington Square North, she led me upstairs to the fourth floor with the …

Mark Lamster|Essays

Seeing Red

Red Bogart blamed technology and changing attitudes for the reason he sold Camp Tomahawk, but Mark Lamster knew there was something more to the story.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Charles Dickens and The BBC

Who would have guessed that a BBC costume drama would provide us with Exhibit-A in the defense’s case — that a mass audience can be engaged without pandering to base instincts?

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Face Value

Facial transplants mapping our future: how much is the world of design responsible?

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Bartleby™

In his classic story of Wall Street, Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville recounts the tale of a humble copyist employed by the story's narrator. Could Bartleby's perfectly crafted refrain be the appropriate response to a world where …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Cease and Design

When my daughter, Fiona, was five years old and first learning to write, she came home from school one day and set to work. Pencil gripped firmly in her tiny hand, she wrote a word — then plunked her first and second fingers down …

William Drenttel|Essays

David Hughes: Caricaturist of Our Time

"Gulf War," illustration by David Hughes, Observer Magazine, 1991.In the 1970s, I worked at the Forum Gallery in New York City. My job was to sort through hundreds of unattributed portraits by David Levine — the caricaturist for the …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

On Considering the Source

A friend of mine, a painter, recently saw a group exhibition at PS1 in New York in which he was struck by the absence of primary source material. Although intentionally abstract works, these paintings all referenced extremely specific …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Shock Of The Old: Rethinking Nostalgia

Nostalgia has always been a bad word for designers. Like "retro" and "vintage" it smacks of a sort of been-there-done-that ennui — looking backward instead of forward, nostalgia presents as the very antithesis of the new. Even …