Cecily Brown, Jeff Koons, Charles Ray The Flag Art Foundation in New York

Ranging from lushly painted canvases to sculptures of extraordinary technical acumen, Cecily Brown, Jeff Koons, Charles Ray includes three artworks by each artist that address themes of youth, nostalgia, and intimacy, and highlight the intersection of innocence and subversion. Jeff Koons and Charles Ray's unprecedented approach to material, scale, and surface have redefined the possibilities of sculpture. Mining the rich psychological territory of childhood and familial relationships, both artists elevate innocent subject matter to monumental status. Cecily Brown explores youth and transience in kaleidoscopic compositions of fleshy, abstracted figures, utilizing the materiality of paint to replicate physical sensation and the illusion of motion. The exhibition will be on view until May 14, 2016 at the Flag Art Foundation, 545 West 25th Street. photographs by Scout Maceachron

Read An Exclusive Excerpt From Amber Sparks' Much Talked About Novella and Collection of Short Stories

In the weird and wonderful tradition of Kelly Link and Karen Russell, Amber Sparks’s dazzling new collection bursts forth with stories that render the apocalyptic and otherworldly hauntingly familiar. In “The Cemetery for Lost Faces,” two orphans translate their grief into taxidermy, artfully arresting the passage of time. The anchoring novella, “The Unfinished World,” unfurls a surprising love story between a free and adventurous young woman and a dashing filmmaker burdened by a mysterious family. Sparks’s stories―populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors―form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Click here to read the excerpt. 

Imperial Teen with Sara Cummings and Kris Kidd: Outtakes by Bil Brown

Typically a fashion photographer is very limited in what they can push out of a shoot, even editorial which tends to scream ADVERTORIAL because of the influences of fashion stylists, fashion editors, editors, and advertising execs. No fashion shoot is purely an "art experience". But as Yves Saint Laurent once said, "Fashion, though not a true art needs artists to survive." Thus I thought, what If I didn't care about the showrooms, the stylists, or seeing a "total look" and just concerned myself with the choices I would make on a shoot? How would that influence the way I would choose the story and art of the shoot itself? Thus, here is the Photographer's Cut of a shoot that I not only shot, but published with fashion director Mynxii White and Stylist Lisa Bae. Except this time, there will be no mention of the fashions. None. Some of the photos are almost behind the scenes, completely unexpected and unregulated. The models in some cases weren't able to pose while in others they were more intense and tired than they needed to be. Some shots are almost macro, close up, unexplained. But there is a mood, a vision. Something is happening that has maybe somewhere happened before. And really... that is what photography should be. Timeless, endless, and never ever able to be seen as "just for that season." Let the work stand on it's own with only the history of photography to judge. photographs and text by Bil Brown, who is also the editor-in-chief of Black and Grey Magazine. 

Read Shane Jones' Short Story "Maneesh in Los Angeles" →

       On Saturday mornings Maneesh tells Sarah things. They have lived together for six months. Sarah refuses to define their relationship, so Sarah is just Sarah and she lives her life saying she has a cold. Maneesh doesn’t understand why Sarah always has a cold, but she says she does and she likes to talk about it. Once a week Sarah works for a veterinarian who makes house calls. The only reason he makes house calls is to put dogs to sleep. The only reason he employs Sarah is to have someone in the house if the dog is too big. Click here to read more.  

Yutaka Sone "Day and Night" @ David Zwirner Gallery In New York

David Zwirner present an exhibition of recent and new works by Yutaka Sone. This will be the artist’s seventh solo show since his first exhibition with the gallery in 1999. Across a wide range of media—predominantly sculpture but also painting, drawing, photography, video, and performance—Sone’s work revolves around a tension between realism and perfection. A conceptual framework, paired with a meticulous attention to detail, has characterized his practice since the early 1990s, informing equally his self-contained jungle environments, life-size roller coasters, magnified snowflakes, and staged events. His sculptural works in particular attest to a profound interest in landscapes, whether natural or architectural, and their extraordinary ability to capture light relates them to a genre primarily associated with painting and photography. Yutaka Sone "Day and Night" will be on view until February 20, 2016, at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer and Tenlie Mourning

Watch The Music Video For The Blaze's Track "Virile"

French electro production duo, The Blaze, have released their spellbinding new video for "Virile" – taken from Bromance Records' forthcoming compilation "Homieland Vol. II". The Blaze defy time and spread confusion amongst minds with their mesmerising video for "Virile". Puffs of thick smoke float over their heads, punches thrown, a kiss on the cheek — in tune with heartbeats. Wild and frenetic, we venture forth on the dance floor before losing control, slowly drifting away by a distant and elusive sound. However, our eyes are captivated by the video where two pals tenderly confront each other, tossing between a cockfight and a courtship ritual. Producers and directors duo The Blaze have crafted a sound between King Tubby and Art Department, while staying resolutely attached to the critically acclaimed 2014 coming of age film, Girlhood lust for life and the raving mad friendship of 1976 French film, Calmos.

Touch The Leather: Read Our Interview With Lias Saoudi, The Electric Lead Singer of The Fat White Family On His New Album, Which Comes Out Today →

Full disclosure: there is nothing objective about this article. I love Fat White Family. The band, to me, represents everything I’ve ever held dear about rock n’ roll: chaos, rebellion, sleaze, art, drugs, poetry, and politics. The first time I saw the band play live, about a year and a half ago, I was more excited than that time I saw Martin Scorsese walking down the Bowery (re: very excited). After housing beers and watching various members of the band run around the venue with their most famous fan and cheerleader, Sean Lennon, I elbowed my way to the front of the hall and got ready to let loose. 15 minutes went by when the band’s six members, gangly, unkempt, and skinny, took to the stage, launching into a particularly cacophonic rendition of the opening chords of the band’s lead single off debut album Champagne Holocaust, Auto Neutron. Lead singer Lias Saoudi, already half naked and sweating like Usain Bolt at the finish line, jittered to the front of the stage like a character in a Chris Cunningham music video and the band belted in unison, “AH AH AHHHH AHHH AHHHHHHH!” Instantly, bodies began colliding in joyous punishment. In various levels of intoxication, the crowd bowed to the revolution of the Fat White Family. It hurt so good. By the end of the song, Lias had his cock out. The scene erupted like a Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition come to life. Click here to read more. 

Dean Levin's First Solo Show "XTC" In Los Angeles @ Kohn Gallery

Dean Levin’s solo exhibition XTC at Kohn Gallery, the artist’s first in Los Angeles, presents a refined iteration of Levin’s ongoing investigation into space, perception, and architecture. At once conceptually utilizing and physically inhabiting the gallery space, the works on view offer discrete moments of architectural deconstruction and reconfiguration, prompting the viewer to objectively consider the space itself, while maintaining a subjective engagement with the resultant products of Levin’s investigatory gesture. Made up of three separate sculptural “vignettes” demarcated by discrete swaths of carpet on the gallery floor, the exhibition can be viewed as an experiential installation whose totality is more than the sum of its various formal parts. Dean Levin: XTC will be on view until February 27, 2016 at Kohn Gallery, 1227 Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Read Kate Wyer's Short Prose Piece "The Pollinator" About Self Piercing and Cultural Barriers →

We are all migrants here. Working with our thumbs and hands in the organic orchid field. We are all brown with the sun and some from family. We do not all speak Spanish. I speak some, enough. I dream it and can tell when I’m the butt of another’s joke. To know slurs and insults, to roll with the subtle, confusingly slow brushes against my backside as I lean into the plants. Click here to read more. 

Punk and Hardcore Fliers, Zines and Ephemera @ Printed Matter In New York

Punk and Hardcore Fliers, Zines and Ephemera is a dynamic representation of a period when music subcultures adopted methods used by earlier culture-jamming groups such as the DaDaists and Situationists to creatively promote their own movement. The materials span from the early 1970s covering the glam rock and punk scenes of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as the garage rock and power pop revivals, American hardcore, English peace-punk, and industrial music scenes to form an overview of underground music culture of the last forty years. Punk and Hardcore Fliers, Zines and Ephemera will be on view until February 13, 2016 at Printed Matter, 231 Eleventh Avenue New York, NY. Photographs by Scout MacEachron

The New Gay Novel Of Our Times: Luke Goebel Reviews Garth Greenwell's Incendiary New Novel

Happy New Year Autre Readers,

I want to tell you about a book that you should read in 2016. I have never written a book review before, but I’ve read a lot of them and had my own book reviewed a couple dozen times, and therefore know that I hate them—they are too long, usually, and too bombastic and too laudatory and too much too much. They either show off or get goopy or refer to too many old works or take shots at the work or as is usually the case are written by friends of the author and biased and shit.

Let’s talk about cocaine. There is hardly any of it that is real anymore. Agreed? I am sober, as in I don’t do drugs anymore, but let’s say that I did have a little taste of toot the other night, as fiction, let’s say that, and that the taste on my tongue was definitely watered down, i.e. stepped on, meth coke bullshit. It’s everywhere, right?

We don’t want our funk stepped on. If there was real coke, in the fiction, I would as a fictional character done a line, and as the Byrds sing, would offer you to take a whiff on me, which is what I will do later in this review. I’ll offer you to take a whiff on me of some real coke.

Garth Greenwell has got your coke, and I’m going to give you a little whiff of his supply, in the sense that Garth has the straight numb your face off wake up powder in the novel he is releasing this month with FSG titled, WHAT BELONGS TO YOU.

This novel, and no I don’t know Garth, was recommended by an author I admire, Alex Che, and so I asked for an ARC (advanced reader’s copy) from Grant and he agreed and sent me over a copy. I read the first page and was keenly aware that Grant has the coke. This masterpiece of his begins in a public bathroom underneath the Sofia National Palace of Culture in Bulgaria where the narrator tells us he first spied the object of his lust and desire, a hustler of charisma with a jagged tooth who is rolling a joint in a stall with another man when the narrator first pays the hustler to let him suck the hustler’s cock in the bathroom. The book goes from there with the intensity of interpersonal drama and identity that brings to mind Oscar Wilde, Fitzgerald, Plath, Nabokov, and is nothing short of our first masterpiece…there I go again doing the thing I hate, the book is a masterpiece. I’m going to give you those tastes I promised now, but as you will see, this book and the writing are something we don’t get anymore. They are a taste of real coke, only without the gasoline, murder, death, guilt, corruption that goes into cocaine. Writing like this simply doesn’t come around anymore. The majority of what we get to read from living authors is part meth at best. This is the pure shit. Enjoy. Text by Luke Goebel. We were going to include some excerpts from the Greenwell's new novel, but all the lit mags, like the Paris Review, claimed dibs, so you may as well just purchase "What Belongs To You: A Novel" here