We’re thrilled to announce that Contemporary Art Library has been awarded a grant from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts! We humbly thank the foundation for supporting our work organizing, preserving and making accessible the history of contemporary art.

The Politie, the national police force of the Netherlands, said it had arrested two men who had allegedly been involved in a robbery at TEFAF Maastricht on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, both men were released from custody, and the two were cleared of involvement in the robbery, according to the Associated Press.

The two men, both of whom are Belgian, are in their 20s. They were arrested while driving what the police identified as a gray car with a Belgian registration number that had been seen near the William-Alexandertunnel in Maastricht.

TEFAF is known for its world-class—and often expensive—antiquities and Old Master paintings. (The fair, whose Maastricht edition closes today, also mounts two New York events annually.) But rather than going for these objects, the thieves had attempted to steal jewelry by smashing open a display case at one booth.

The dealer who brought that jewelry to the fair, and what the thieves managed to steal, has not been identified by either the Politie or TEFAF itself.

In video posted to social media, one of the armed thieves nearly hurls a vase filled with flowers as another rams a stanchion into a booth. Following the robbery, the fair was briefly evacuated. TEFAF previously said it “has robust procedures in the event of a security breach. These were precisely followed, and all visitors, exhibitors and staff were safely evacuated.”

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

On “Tower of Song” (1988), Leonard Cohen’s weary croak cracks the joke: “I was born like this / I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” He can’t quite sustain his own melody, but some of us remain enchanted—and not merely by his self-effacement. The irony, we suspect, involves us, too. Choicelessness is one of his great themes: we don’t choose our blessings or our deficits, and we don’t choose our material conditions. Fine. But Leonard Cohen takes it further: maybe we can’t even control the impulse to defy our deficits, to work against the grain of what we’ve been given. We feel sentenced to sing even without a golden voice—by our own unruly desires, or by “twenty-seven angels from the great beyond.” The metaphorical cause matters less than the effect: “They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song.”

Leonard Cohen came to music late, at least compared to his countercultural contemporaries. Bob Dylan was twenty-one when he released his first album; Leonard Cohen was thirty-three. He struggled to adapt his literary strategies to the new form. Even before his baritone stiffened with age, there was something workmanlike in his sensuous, spiritual, serious songs—not just in his delivery, but in his compositional structure, his preference for the heavy-handed end rhyme. Park / dark. Alone / stone. Pinned / sin. Soon / moon. He never made much use of slant rhyme, syncopation, or any of the sinuous tricks of great vocalists from the blues tradition. The second verse of “Tonight Will Be Fine” (1969) seems to describe the monastic simplicity of his compositions: “I choose the rooms that I live in with care / The windows are small and the walls almost bare / There’s only one bed and there’s only one prayer / I listen all night for your step on the stair.” For me, Leonard Cohen’s voice is that step on the stair—stumbling through the song’s tidy rooms, making the floorboards groan. His flatfooted rhythm makes wisdom’s weight hit harder.

I sometimes think of Leonard Cohen seated like a stone on Mount Baldy, where he became an actual monk in 1994 and where he lived for five years. I know a guy who studied at the same monastery. He would try to catch the singer stirring during morning meditation—even just breathing—but his stillness seemed absolute. This discipline frightens me, though it must have been hard-won. I like his songs because they let us overhear the rage and desire rattling discipline’s wooden frame: “I’m interested in things that contribute to my survival,” Cohen told David Remnick. He liked the Beatles just fine, but he needed Ray Charles. And I need Leonard Cohen—not the Zen master, but “this laborer called a writer” (his words) arduously working through a voice too plain for his own poetry. He keeps me company in the difficult silence between my own sentences. “I can hear him coughing all night long, / a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.” We’re both still straining—sweetly—for the music.

A surprising source of radical art

Today, we’re giving the definitive lowdown on football’s spiritual home: stadiums. What makes a stadium special? What’s the world’s steepest stand? And how exactly can Pete Donaldson improve everyone’s viewing experience? Control of the undersoil heating, that’s how.

Marcus, Vish and Pete tackle those questions, some stadium history, and much more in today’s Guide! 

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May 12 – July 1, 2022

May 6 – June 25, 2022

About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun. I said I’d think about it.

I couldn’t pretend to be that surprised by the proposition, or ignorant of my part in engendering it. I was too tired. I was too busy. The baby the baby the baby. I had a deadline. I was reading. I was watching The Sopranos (again). I was depressed. I just wanted a nap, needed a nap, ached for a hot throbbing nap. This might, I figured, be “real” marriage, harder deeper marriage, marriage opening its cute mouth all the way and showing the mess that was back there.

Accidental iPhone video of forty minutes in the kitchen one night, a view of the cutting board and the wallpaper: You can hear a baby and the banging of something metal and you can hear our two adult bodies rustling around the space, running water, sliding a knife into the knife holder, dragging a chair across the wood floor, opening and closing the fridge―a sound like a breath and then nothing. We speak in short, muffled bursts, loving to her, not unloving to each other.

Maybe, I thought, the libido of a certain kind of woman is an animal that lives a little and then crawls into a cave and lies there panting for a few decades until, with a final ragged pant, it expires. Could it expire so early? Or perhaps it was taking a breather postpartum—understandable, surely, given how a six-and-a half-pound human body had been slither-pulled out of the place I get fucked, or one of the places.

How technology can help uncover art's mysteries

May 19 – June 25, 2022