The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?
There’s something pathetic about contemporary attempts to paint the present as an opportunity for art. Too late! If all it takes to “change” art is a change in the American president, there’s not much there to change. This is indeed an opportunity, but it is a shallow opportunity. If change might so easily be had, why was this opportunity not posed in 2020? Better yet, 2016?
My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .
Patrick Zapien will present a lecture on Theodor Adorno’s “Draft Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory. The lecture will focus on the dialectic of freedom in art, its historical crisis, and how that crisis appears as the enigmatic essence of art in modernity.
Caesura hosts an online panel on “The Crisis of Art Criticism", featuring Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review, Troy Sherman of Midwest Art Quarterly, and Gareth Thomas Kaye of Chicago Spleen.
Today, there is really no urgency to reflect on Jon McNaughton’s body of work. Adam Lehrer’s recent article in Compact, “The Limits of MAGA Art,'' stakes this out clearly. There is much less danger to endorsing McNaughton in the midst of a failing Biden presidency than there was at the height of anti-Trump hysteria . . . Why address it at all then?
In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967).
“El Desdichado” doesn’t quite work through melancholy but gives form and refuge to it.
“…the triptych painfully reminds us that the form today signifies a broken totality that can only be unified, at best, by an act of artistic creation.”
And I wondered if I was awake or asleep, if it was the moon's paleness or Lucifer's, if it was midnight or dawn!
As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics
It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.
I knew I wanted to write a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence when I walked out of the theater and a man in front of me exclaimed to a woman by his side, "That was dogshit!"
Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .
It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.
Genese Grill reviews Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889–1914.
Patrick James Dunagan reviews Ted Berrigan’s Collected Prose.
Harris Wheless reviews Damion Searls’ new translation of André Gide’s “Marshlands.”
Suzy V reviews Yesiyu Zhao's show "Journey to the West” at David Castillo Gallery in Miami.
Del O’Brien reviews Gala Porras-Kim's show "Correspondences towards the living object” at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Politically, melancholia may be more destructive than idealism, but aesthetically, doesn’t melancholia, as a kind of negative idealism, seem almost natural?
Victor Cova introduces a 1941 exchange between Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton.
Gilberto Perez’s commentary on history as seen through the lens of the filmmaker duo Straub-Huillet.
Personally, I associate Satie’s work with a feeling of the aridity that Nietzsche came to value over Wagnerism — the gentle sea-breeze in the highest mountains that wafts in from some strange land and tickles the senses with possibilities of spiritual freedom.
As the artist, reaching deep into nothing, with nothing, and only for the sake of desire, creates something great, far beyond the imagined object of desire, fulfilling and exceeding every wish in a way which could never have been fully anticipated, so too does the lover encounter the beloved.
He was not a literary artist in the sense that his work doesn’t seem to wrestle with questions of form; he’s not attempting to reinvent the surrealist modes at his disposal but rather making use of them as vehicles for his insurgent imagination and apocalyptic vision, the fury of which elevates his writing above and beyond the mere assemblage of irrational word combinations.
When I looked up Barrax’s collections, I found that his work spans not only relatively traditional-looking lyrics, but formally experimental poems that disarrange syntax and disperse words across the page.
After a century of deafness to the task and ambition of music, composers may need to relearn how to learn before Schumann’s words can even begin to make sense. How can the music of the past free the music of the present?
Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis.
Helen Adam is a singular luminary whose ballads, if you read them out loud and late at night, will sneak into your mind and create phantasmagorias of exquisite, sensual, brooding, and melancholy fairy-tales.
Bret Schneider delves into everything from Indian ragas to Bach’s recreation of the mind with composer and pianist Michael Harrison.
Bret Schneider speaks with composer Katrina Krimsky about her career spanning half a century.
“I wanted to connect to people who were like-minded but also saw this as a new frontier with a lot of possibilities for art making.”
Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain discuss musical composition and their albums Drunk Walks and What Goes Away.
“The betrayal of artists by society, their commitment to achieve through their efforts historical feats of the imagination and the myriad ways in which these are undermined, represents the real content of the film.”