I haven’t read a gigantic exhibition catalogue in a long time, but the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting “Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures,” their most ambitious show in years, so I thought I’d go all in.

So far, the essays are fair. The curators of the exhibition and the authors of the catalogue essays want to complicate the standard notions that all West German art is derived from Expressionism and all East German art is derived from Soviet models of Socialist Rea More...

During my attendance at the LACMA exhibition of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures I had the pleasure of engaging with fragments from this book. Paging through the museum's exhibit copy, the act of perusing photos of artistic works took on spectacularly new resonance when I could look up and view the piece being discussed. The art-science of writing blurbs to accompany exhibit pieces must be agonizing due to the need for brevity and clarity, and it was delightful to explore more fully the thoughts More...