Critical Read

Feature Article

Winnowing the Wynn

The newly completed — and eerily deserted — conference pavilion at Wynn Las Vegas seems more Twilight Zone set than resort wing. Covid-19 has emptied the pavilion of weddings; the annual World of Concrete plenary session belongs to a maskless era. >

Los Angeles Times

Feature Article

Look beyond The Strip: Las Vegas has reinvented itself as a literary destination

Thompson’s crazed merry-go-round bar no longer serves alcohol, but you can still ride the two-story carousel while circus acts perform overhead. Patrons eating ice cream rotate on the top level while gamblers playing slots spin around one story below. >

KNPR Desert Companion

Book Review

Whose Land Is It Anyway?

Blending travelogue, biography, environmental study, and nature writing, Leave It As It Is strides down perilous paths bloodied by genocide, fords rivers of corporate greed, scales a steep slope of pragmatic optimism, and provides thoughtful perspective on the future. >

Artcritical

Art Criticism

Encounters Between Seer and Seen: Lee Ufan at the Guggenheim

No wonder the sculptures derive their power from a fanatical obsession with equilibrium, in which various components — material, spatial and proportional — toggle between harmony and chaos. >

KNPR Desert Companion

Nonfiction Story

Cosmic Relief

Anybody who read their December horoscope knew that the 2020 Great Conjunction was a big deal. Even people who dismissed the symbolic code of astrology acknowledged that something mighty was going on in the sky. >

HuffPost

Book Review

Joanne Kyger: The Poet-Buddhist-Ecologist Combo You Should Know

For more than five decades, Kyger has lived a humble life on the coastal mesa of Bolinas, California, diligently building an oeuvre that has slipped right through of the hands of the literary establishment. >

Las Vegas Weekly

Exhibition Review

Genius or Vandal? provides unauthorized insight into Banksy's artistic accomplishment

Several Banksy works riffing on established artists (Andy Warhol, Keith Haring) suggest that the artist is self-conscious about his place in history, caught as he is between the social critique of street art and the heady millions of a Sotheby’s gavel. >

Third Factory

Book Review

Attention Span: Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940–1956

Even Neil Cassady — the muse of many — abandoned him. Was it the disagreement over the marijuana? Or the ménage-à-trois? It’s hard to say. Kerouac’s life was often messy. >

KNPR Desert Companion

Exhibition Review

Visual Art: Old Meets New Meets Wow!

No longer confined to rectangular picture planes, the cloud-wave combo seems freer than ever, as if the artist were riding Hokusi’s boat as it shreds the crest where sea and sky are one. >

HuffPost

Exhibition Review

Mighty Land Artist Michael Heizer Reveals a Softer Side

A man who willfully makes his mark on the rangeland of central Nevada with coyotes, cattle and the occasional cowboy for company isn’t hankering after the limelight. >

Artcritical

Art Criticism

James Ensor at the Museum of Modern Art

In a Kafkaesque moment in 1893, Ensor tried, in despair, to sell his studio and all its contents. There was no buyer. He carried on. >

KNPR Desert Companion

Book Review

The Book on Michael Heizer

The cantankerous artistic genius has met his match in Fox, who understands Heizer’s artwork better than anyone, partly because Fox, like Heizer, is Nevadan. This is deep-state stuff, in the literal sense of the term: Nevada playas, Nevada vistas, Nevada’s native cultures, Nevada’s dirt, rock, and stone. >

Image details based on the following photos and illustrations: 1. Barbara Kraft; 2. Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times; 3. Courtesy KNPR; 4. Ufan’s Marking Infinity by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; 5. Christopher Smith; 6. Donald Guravich; 7. Banksy’s Stop Esso courtesy Las Vegas Weekly; 8. Penguin Books; 9. Courtesy Sush Machida; 10. Michael Heizer’s Double Negative © Brent Holmes; 11. James Ensor's Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels; 12. The Monicelli Press / KNPR