The Brooklyn Rail

On a sunny Saturday late morning this Spring, Rail Publisher Phong Bui paid a visit to the sculptor Tom Doyle’s home/studio in Roxbury, Conneticut, where he has lived with his wife Jane since 1992.

On the occasion of Simon Frost’s recent exhibit, Nimbus, at Peter Blum SoHo, which will be on view till May 10, 2008, the artist welcomed Rail Art Editor John Yau on-site to view his new body of work.

Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art History at the University of Texas-Austin, and the author of Doubt (Routledge, 2008). Katy Siegel, who earned her Ph.D. with Shiff, is an associate professor of art history at Hunter College, and a contributing editor at Artforum.

A sense of life’s tragic dimensions has sometimes produced art criticism that does more than merely conclude in futile, Sisyphean fashion with some supposedly unchanging “condition humaine.” After all, tragedy in art is not always about hopelessness, nor is it necessarily even humorless.