Most-Read of 2020
As the year comes to a close, we look back on our most-read articles of 2020. From Chris Cutrone’s masterful braiding of Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno, and Greenberg to Bret Schneider’s reflections on Dream Journal, the Black Square, the end of Trump Art, and the mercurial lyrics of Billie Chernicoff, take a look at what other readers have found and deemed worthy:
Beautiful and mysterious in the extreme, Chernicoff’s poems are messages from the borderline offered as testimony to the thrilling precariousness of our spiritual adventure.
Artists of our generation are so hopeless that they would rather wish for fascism than confront the real challenge of the present.
The art that casts a critical eye towards our society in its totality, or even just employs ambiguity to inspire criticality in its viewers, is met with skepticism, if not hostility.
Art itself doesn’t need to be defended: even when it whispers fake nothings, or indulges suspicious behavior, it speaks more than any defense ever could.
If objects — like that dead paintbrush — mean nothing but their functional definition, a human being might well be nothing more than a machine for destroying nature; love, a purely mechanical function.
David Lynch has an impeccable ability to generate an attuned viewer. His Weather Reports show that he can do so in less than a minute. Even more than that, they illustrate the extent to which Lynch is a devout practitioner of art.
When people today criticize the leaders of the American Revolution they only project their own narrowness and narcissism onto the conditions of the past. Had the American Revolution been defeated, in 1776 or in 1865, there would be no critique of present freedom possible today and no hope for any greater freedom in the future.
Jafa’s omnipotent sun of tradition is there to remind us that what is considered freedom now is merely the allowance we are given to be a controlled emanation of society as it exists.
Modernist art for Trotsky could not be considered a new culture but rather an expression of the task and demand for transcending bourgeois society and culture.
Nobody is going to remember blackout Tuesday. That wasn’t the point. It wasn’t even really an experience, and we won’t learn anything from it.