The odd couple: agitprop and the griot tradition

A short story

First broadcast in 1983, Robert Ashley’s TV opera Perfect Lives is a talkative exploration of sociability and storytelling

Five contemporary painters, from Charline von Heyl to Tauba Auerbach, discuss the role of abstraction

The story of Los Angeles-based artist Kaari Upson’s long-term ‘Larry Project’

What are the economics involved when artists have children?

The surge in popularity of The Metropolitan Museum

Early 20th-century literary characterization; imagination, action and agency

Part of the the romance of this breed of lost experimentalists relates to their financial struggles 

Informed by the online debris of stock photography, a number of artists are exploring the ‘off-world’ of digital imagery 

In an ongoing series, frieze asks an artist, curator or writer to list the books that have influenced them

Amelia Groom considers the Japanese architecture group Metabolism, while Nick Currie talks to Rem Koolhaas about organic cities and flexible buildings

Tropical Modernism and the ‘potential of nostalgia’; photographs, prints and new layers of memory

Community organizing and AIDS activism; ‘Full Body Quotation’ and party hosting

The ups and downs of failure as a creative tool

Marie Darrieussecq responds to the filmic meditations of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva

Documentary films and sci-fi encounters; assumption, truth and magic

The fourth novel from New York-based writer Ben Marcus is a powerful allegory about language

Held across eight Italian galleries and museums, ‘Arte Povera 2011’ fails the original spirit of the art movement created by Germano Celant

Inspired by Peter Schjeldahl and John Kelsey, Sam Thorne delves into art criticism's tradition of untidiness