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What is really feared in loud music is not the loudness, but the ugliness
Our art education does not produce artists or critics, but little art historians – worse, librarians! We are what Nietzsche described as “idlers in the garden of knowledge,” individuals with an Alexandrian relationship with art, art as an infinite archive of “works” to be perused, art as mere culture. Our spirit transforms art into artifacts.
Art occupies a precarious position in society. The artist even more so. One the hand, art is officially sanctioned. It is generally taught, and ‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ are almost universally encouraged . . . But the true artist, as Octave declaims in his eulogy on the rock, knows that he “is a misfit, a stranger, a prophet none believe, and to whom none relate.”
CRITICISM
What is really feared in loud music is not the loudness, but the ugliness
Our art education does not produce artists or critics, but little art historians – worse, librarians! We are what Nietzsche described as “idlers in the garden of knowledge,” individuals with an Alexandrian relationship with art, art as an infinite archive of “works” to be perused, art as mere culture. Our spirit transforms art into artifacts.
Art occupies a precarious position in society. The artist even more so. One the hand, art is officially sanctioned. It is generally taught, and ‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ are almost universally encouraged . . . But the true artist, as Octave declaims in his eulogy on the rock, knows that he “is a misfit, a stranger, a prophet none believe, and to whom none relate.”
The further one surrenders to the compositional dynamics in each work, the more archetypal or elemental they seem to become. They are classically modernist in this sense, distilling form into an essential image, a snapshot of a prototypical aesthetic idea. This seems resonant with the glyph theme in their titling. Juxtapositional interventions — in this case Hurley’s sticks — resolve into a formal irreducibility.
I penned the bulk of this review on the back of conversations with friends when we watched the film after it came to Hulu in the summer of 2023. But I sat on it, convinced that no one in the broader public had seen Chevalier — or ever would.
“I’m not fit to be a mother. There’s something else I’d have to do first — to change myself from a doll to a real human being.” With these words, Nora Helmer (Sarah Wharton) leaves her husband Torvald (Stephen Dexter) at the end of Royston Coppeneger’s new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (2024).
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.
“Film is, for me, an art of composition.”
Philippe Jaccottet’s 1981 essay on Osip Mandelstam, with poems translated by Matvei Yankelevich and John High.
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.
ISSUE 1: ART & FREEDOM
This issue of Caesura looks back on Surrealism not as an answer to the current crisis of art, but as one of the last movements to raise it as a question for life. The legacy of Surrealism is undoubtedly problematic: its novel techniques and strange effects have been repeatedly hypostatized and deployed in the production, both high and low, of culture industry kitsch. Still something remains of its original drive: to pierce the veil of appearance for a glimpse at the underlying forms that constitute subjective experience. For the concrete, as Marx says, “is concrete by virtue of being the concentration of many determinations.” Surrealism — more real than reality itself.
ART
“It’s the stark-open when / the sky disappears into the lake without aid”
Failure of failures. Gluck and Vika’s adventure comes to an end…for now!
Gluck turns a corner and encounters a challenge he’d never anticipated, revealing the true scale of his conflict. Will he give up…or find new strength?
Breaking out of jail is something of a specialty for Gluck. Finding his way around an unfamiliar city isn’t hard either. What does Gluck struggle with? I’m glad you asked!
What is really feared in loud music is not the loudness, but the ugliness
Bret Schneider delves into everything from Indian ragas to Bach’s recreation of the mind with composer and pianist Michael Harrison.
ISSUE 1: ART & FREEDOM
This issue of Caesura looks back on Surrealism not as an answer to the current crisis of art, but as one of the last movements to raise it as a question for life. The legacy of Surrealism is undoubtedly problematic: its novel techniques and strange effects have been repeatedly hypostatized and deployed in the production, both high and low, of culture industry kitsch. Still something remains of its original drive: to pierce the veil of appearance for a glimpse at the underlying forms that constitute subjective experience. For the concrete, as Marx says, “is concrete by virtue of being the concentration of many determinations.” Surrealism — more real than reality itself.
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