December 21, 2020 Issue

I love the way Peter Schjeldahl’s “The Fix We’re In,” in this week’s issue, moves from intriguing specificity (“What unites Rashid Johnson’s grease-stick abstraction, conjuring a state of alarm in a pigment that he has invented and dubbed Anxious Red; Cecily Brown’s pencilled carnage of game animals after a seventeenth-century still-life by Frans Snyders; and a meticulous, strikingly sombre self-portrait by R. Crumb?”) to gorgeous abstraction (“When time is a trackless waste, escapes from the aridity detonate”), and then back to the concrete (“But here we are, and '100 Drawings from Now' vivifies the situation for me”). It’s a wonderful rhythm. No one does it better than Schjeldahl.