bat-baby begins March 31, 2014 11:30 am By Abraham Riesman Share Share Tweet Pin It 25 Photos Photo: DC Comics Happy birthday to Batman! This week marks the 75th anniversary of the debut of Gotham’s grimmest vigilante, in the pages of 1939’s Detective Comics #27. And that means 75 years of dark, gritty superhero tales, right? Not exactly! Here’s a little-known fact: A surprisingly large portion of Batman’s publication history has featured truly ridiculous stories with even more ridiculous cover images.

gallery June 17, 2016 2:24 pm By Carl Swanson Share Share Tweet Pin It 19 Photos Photo: Pierpaolo Ferrari In the introduction to a new856-page chronicle of his art-world life over the past 33 years, the Greek Cypriot collector Dakis Joannou writes that “when people ask how I define DESTE’s program” — DESTE is the name of his art foundation — ”I respond that I do whatever I want.

tv June 13, 2011 12:00 pm By Margaret Lyons Share Share Tweet Pin It 6 Photos Photo: Courtesy of HBO “Sexposition” is the clever technique of jazzing up boring plot exposition by pairing it with sex. Game of Thrones isn’t the first show to try to liven up its occasionally burdensome explanations with a little nudity, but boy oh boy, do the seven kingdoms love it.

jerry saltz September 16, 2012 9:05 pm By Jerry Saltz Share Share Tweet Pin It 8 Photos Photo: Courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery, New York and The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I’ve ever seen them before. Yet even we who love the Met know that with notable exceptions it has pooh-poohed, misconstrued, or messed up the art of the second half of the twentieth century pretty much since it was made.

trendspotting October 13, 2014 2:30 pm By Margaret Lyons Share Share Tweet Pin It 26 Photos The fall season is juuuust underway, and while a few stragglers will premiere in the rest of October, we’re mostly up and running. So far, this season hasn’t had any major new hits or any genre breakthroughs. But one thing is common across network and cable, comedy and drama, hit and underdog shows right now: Female characters are wearing a lot of leather.

Awfulsome. Where awful and awesome meet, rub up against each other, and birth something new — something simultaneously good and bad. Katy Perry’s ecstatically, enjoyably, endearingly hollow album Teenage Dream, out today, is full of lyrics that embody this term — awful lyrics that after repeated hearings (and, there will be repeated hearings!) begin to earn some admiration for being so brazenly, so straightforwardly, so bravely ridiculous. Consider: Thanks to Perry’s unavoidably catchy “Peacock,” in a few months Americans will be going about their business with the phrase, “I want to see your peacock cock cock cock” stuck in their heads.

Apple TV+’s Foundation did what many thought was impossible: take Isaac Asimov’s groundbreaking, centuries-spanning books and make them into a cohesive television show. The second season of the series is underway, and while we wait each week to see how the psychohistory plays out, we’ll have to turn elsewhere to get our fix for epic, temporally expansive sci-fi stories. Foundation is the story of the crumbling of a galactic empire, something that slowly but inevitably takes place over generations.

Is an Instagram worth a thousand words? You bet your smart phone camera it is! With so many ways to stay in touch and be constantly entertained by our favorite comedians every second of every day via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube and so on, Instagram gets lost in the mix. You best check yourself (and your apps) to make sure that camera icon is moved to your home screen because top notch entertainment in the form of photos and comments are right there waiting to make you LOL, or whatever it is you do when projecting your approval of something funny.

TCDBETH EC029 Not every television game show can be a Jeopardy! or a Wheel of Fortune, seemingly permanent fixtures of the television landscape. Not every game-show catchphrase can be “Come on down!” or “Is that your final answer?” Tons and tons of game shows have come and gone over the years, and some of them seem to be forever lost to the sands of time. (Which itself could be a game show, maybe with a giant hourglass of some kind?

Earlier this month, the incomparable indie rock songwriter Mitski released her fifth album, Be the Cowboy. On it, slinky disco and country twinges intermingle with her ever-discerning ear for bringing revealing characters to life. It’s a huge a sonic leap for a songwriter who, since 2012’s Lush, has shown that she possesses a preternatural ability to encapsulate the messiness of growing up, falling in and out of love — and trying to find a foothold within a constant whiplash of changing people in a shifting world.