To Live Is to Believe

Remembering Ursula von Rydingsvard, an Epstein survivor’s message for MoMA, interviews with Paul Pfeiffer and Layli Long Soldier, and the best costumes of our artsy Halloween party.

On a fair afternoon in Queens, New York, a woman in a red dress crosses the street in front of me with an actual axe under her arm. Her face is stern, her step fast, and you can tell from the blood on her axe that she wasn’t using it to chop wood. A police siren wails in the distance, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.

I reach to lock the car and then remember it’s Halloween.

At a warm and lovely dinner at Cabinet Magazine, founder and editor-in-chief Sina Najafi shows us a photograph of tightrope walker Margret Zimmermann balancing on a high wire above the bombed-out ruins of the Haymarket in Cologne, Germany, in 1946. She looks her finest in her red lipstick, but a treacherous wind is blowing in her hair as a crowd watches from far below.

Outside, Brooklyn seems to be getting richer and poorer at the same time. A man wearing a bejeweled crown asks me for money. In this city, performance artists are beggars and beggars are performance artists.

At Hyperallergic’s art-themed Halloween party, dozens of guests show up with impressive costumes and really commit to the act. Claire Valdez, an artist and organizer who’s running for Congress, drops by and serves as a judge in our art costume contest. I don’t have a costume, but I perform all night.

“To live is to believe,” Marcel Duchamp says in a video on my phone screen. A little girl dressed as Lady Liberty crosses the street with her mother, a torch in her hand. She keeps the torch held high as they walk off, and that makes me smile.

A Dutch still life, “Beast Jesus,” several esoteric Goya characters, and not one but two Marina Abramović/Ulay references (and not even the most obvious ones!) walk into a bar ... That’s a Hyperallergic Halloween, baby!

On Wednesday evening, October 28, almost 200 of our members, readers, artists, supporters, and their enthusiastic friends rolled into Oberon in Brooklyn for our annual art costume party.

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Long associated with witchcraft and bad luck, the black feline became an emblem of artistic rebellion and urban life in 19th-century Paris. | Rebecca Schiffman

From the Kelly Clarkson’s mechanical bird fiasco to Carrie Bradshaw’s Dior newsprint dress, Gay Halloween speaks to the staying power of women’s iconic media moments. | Rhea Nayyar

An exhibition at the Academy Museum explores the transgressive power of scary movies, channeling our deepest fears about life, death, and the unknown. | Matt Stromberg

Ken Russell’s film designed by Derek Jarman, newly released in a 4K restoration, mirrors the horrors unfolding outside our windows. | Phillip Pyle

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“You Can See Everything” is toted as a documentary, but is Fielder a performance artist playing a documentarian? | Rebecca Schiffman

A show at the Getty demonstrates the way modernist approaches to photography shifted the visual culture of Mexico in the 20th century. | Armando Pulido

It’s a provocative and discursive exploration of how artists respond to our late-capitalist epoch, but its focus on “rupture” raises questions. | Neil Price

From Robert Rauschenberg and Josef Albers to Vija Celmins and Julie Mehretu, artists have tinkered outside their comfort zones at Gemini G.E.L. | David S. Rubin

Her environmental paintings ask: What can we do to change our destiny? What effect can we have on the place we inhabit? | John Yau

Institutions must reckon with the possibility that their prestige can be used to legitimize people whose conduct warrants serious investigations. | Danielle Bensky

As the legal dispute over the paintings’ ownership continues, no one seems to be asking: What were their names? Who may still be grieving their deaths? What decision would best honor them? | Cristiana Grigore

Instead of leaving the South behind, the polymath artist carried it into her writings, zines, paintings, and “shack sculptures” that echo the architecture of her childhood. | Maria Owen

As an artist who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, I recommend Isaac Butler’s “The Perfect Moment” for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression. | Martha Wilson

In the legal system, art created by refugees and incarcerated people can serve both as a form of therapy and as evidence of mass atrocities. | Duaa Shah

I spoke to the poet, who is my longtime friend and colleague, about her new book, the threads connecting poetry and visual art, and how Lakota philosophy suffuses her work. | Dyani White Hawk

“Perhaps the stadium is actually the replacement for the UN as a symbolic gathering point to conduct world politics,” the artist told Hyperallergic in an interview. | Brian Karl

Yuntao Xu’s art show in a gas station, LA’s first gallery run for and by Black artists, iris yirei hu’s reliquaries for a dream, and April Bey’s alien tapestries of human life. | Matt Stromberg

The exhibition shares two new sections of the public art mural on view for the first time, featuring moments from an era of collective action that still resonates today.

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