J.C. Hallman

Art brut “auteurs” are not artists, I’m told. The champions of art brut—variously translated as “raw,” “rough,” or “outsider” art—stress that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, ...

I first caught wind of the blooming of the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower—a titan arum, more properly termed—during the Republican National Convention, when caretakers first announced that their ten years of careful labor, watering and fertilizing a ...

I have it on good authority that I’m a snob. The epithet is fair enough: I have little patience with popular literature, even though popular literature, by dint of its popularity, is arguably the most effective tool a writer can use to file a claim about the world, ...

If it had been up to me—and it really should have been—Playboy wouldn’t have abandoned its voyeuristic legacy of naked-lady photo spreads and centerfolds. Instead, I would’ve doubled down, expanded the magazine to the epic scale that, say, Vogue attains ...

The phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retirement”—and that seems to be what it is now, a phenomenon—is not about a writer’s vanity, an ego grown so massive it’s like a publicity black hole sucking up limelight that might have shined warmly on other equally deserving ...