People Are Talking About
Art
Just after the Public Art Fund brought Anish Kapoor’s spellbinding
work Descension, an endless spiral of dark water that leads to nowhere,
to Brooklyn Bridge Park comes their artful intervention at City Hall
Park. This month, Estonian artist Katja Novitskova installs seven
otherworldly sculptures in the downtown green space. Embossed on sheets
of aluminum, each work depicts celestial and terrestrial imagery that
plays into our collective picture and technology obsessions. Meanwhile
in midtown, Josiah McElheny creates a haven for spontaneous expression
in Madison Square Park with three pieces in painted wood and prismatic
glass: a curvilinear wall to enhance music, a reflective floor for dance, a nd
pavilions for poetry—public art for public consumption. — LILAH RAMZI
KATJA NOVITSKOVA’S RENDERING FOR EARTH POTENTIAL, 2017.
Design
The highly anticipated debut
collection of home goods by cultish
design magazine Cabana is finally
upon us. Our favorite: this carafe-
and-tumbler set, hand-blown in
Murano, featuring Tyrolean motifs
inspired by eighteenth-century
bottles that Cabana founder Martina
Mondadori Sartogo spotted in an
Austrian antiques store. “I think this
is so genius for a bedside table,”
she says. Consider this glassware
for the bedroom.— SAMANTHA REES
CABANA’S HANDMADE BEDSIDE-
TABLE CARAFE-AND-TUMBLER SET.
VE
ON the Table
Books
“I’d run out of options. That’s how these things usually
happen,” explains Mary, the heroine of Catherine Lacey’s
tartly feminist second novel, The Answers (FSG),
who pays for her New Age therapy by taking part in a
narcissistic actor’s “Girlfriend Experiment,” with chilling
results. The Northern Irish sisters in Nick Laird’s Modern
Gods (Viking) find their attempts at fresh starts—via a
BBC show on religion and a second wedding—doomed
by legacies of fanaticism. A Delhi family gets schooled in
upward mobility in Diksha Basu’s ultra-charming debut,
The Windfall (Crown), while a marital reboot becomes
a zip line to disaster in Maile Meloy’s holiday cruise–set
thriller Do Not Become Alarmed (Riverhead), in which
the children’s moral complexity outstrips that of their
parents. And generational rebellion is in the air in Estep
Nagy’s 1960s Maine–set ode to a disintegrating WASP
order, We Shall Not All Sleep (Bloomsbury), written for
a new era of uncertainty, in which there’s much to believe
in and little to depend on.— MEGAN O’GRADY
P ATA > 8 4
COU
FUND,
Sculpture
GARDENING