Alex Jovanovich

“What was once a struggling flame is fast becoming an ember. But if you try to keep burning, then so will I.”

“This past year was bad. And the next four, I fear, will be hideous. Grace is going to be in perilously short supply—do what you can to preserve yours so that it may be shared with others.”

“Some hearts miraculously endure. Agosto Machado—artist, activist, thespian, muse, historian, raconteur, and perennial fashion plate—is one of them.”

“Even in death, the angelic Nozkowski continues to give us life.”

“Maybe one day, when the planet's a charred and fallow husk, a lone soul will come across a painting by Covert in a dilapidated museum with the words BETTE DAVIS emblazoned across it. This person, not knowing who she was, will say her name aloud, perhaps with some confusion, bringing the actress back to life for just a few seconds. It's an oddly comforting thought.”

“Covert is a kind of noble gleaner for these unsettling end-times, a collector of all those brittle leaves that fell from Earth's once mighty redwoods.”

“Crepuscular, cancerous, unclean: Judy Fox's eerie, life-size effigy of a dead Snow White, 2007, is nothing like Disney's apple-cheeked version of the tortured young blueblood. Fox's is grim—authentically Grimm.”

“Death is met by sweetness and light in the ebullient, ethereal work of Agatha Wojciechowsky.”

“I think our culture's forgotten how to mourn, since we're so terrified of death and reflection.”

“What a funny irony—to be swathed in recherché jewelry and clothes that probably cost more than most middle-class homes, dying for a sandwich. By the time I left, weary and weirded out, I was dying for one, too.”

“They should disappear into the background, like helpful little ghosts.”

“The din was often unsettling. It made me imagine what the hordes assembled around the guillotine during the Reign of Terror must've sounded like: screams of elation, screams of devastation.”

“Sad, strange, dull, expensive—these are the words that immediately came to mind when I first walked through an Erewhon.”

“It seems that Currin's brand of transgression has grown into something banal, inane—what once spit hot venom now only passes gas, and weakly.”

“His world is a heterosexual hell, populated by homely Ice Storm–era swingers, middle-class cretins, and the terminally clueless.”

“Trump is a travesty of power and virility, a deep-discount Übermensch who rose from the most abysmal of expectations.”

“Jacoby's sculptures look like nightmare hospital equipment (dialyzers, glaucoma machines) unearthed from some Cronenbergian version of the former Yugoslavia.”

“Looking at Philip Van Aver's exquisite gouache-and-ink paintings—tiny paper masterpieces no bigger than a valentine, yet filled with more love hours than can ever be repaid—I understand this failure of spirit in the presence of beauty.”

“You feel the inexplicably greasy buttons of an old school uniform and are suddenly filled with rage. You fondly recall the snaps on a pair of jeans that were excitedly unfastened during your first sexual encounter. And you surely tallied the pearly rosettes on your mother's favorite blouse before the lid of her casket was unceremoniously lowered.”

“Jernigan reminds us that trash is just as democratizing—the same strain of commercial refuse can appear anywhere in this world, from a sleepy college town to a Mexican state that is home to ancient Mayan ruins.”