The present moment is marked by the return of painting. The postmodern theorist Douglas Crimp made his indictment of painting in a historical moment that was actually marked by the return of painting after its demise at the hands of the avant-garde in the 60’s and 70’s. Crimp wrote “The End of Painting” in 1981. But rather than confirming Crimp’s speculation of an end of painting, we seem to be living in a moment that would suggest the end of the avant-garde.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Pluribus—Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s lauded new Apple TV series about humanity becoming infected by an extraterrestrial virus and  mentally united into a permanent groupthink-like state—is what it reflects. Released in 2025, the year of the great backlash against large language models (LLMs), all that critics and viewers have been able to talk about is how the series’ brainwashed, mentally “joined” humans, who are uniformly literal-minded and perfunctory, talk and behave exactly like ChatGPT.

We need not pretend that there is anything inherently subversive about free-standing paintings, not at a time and in a cultural milieu that seems willing to accept anything as art, whether stretched on custom strainers or duct-taped to the wall. What is, however, truly subversive (since the artworld seems intent upon that term) is a good painting—a few of which were on view last month in The Individualism of Dona Nelson at CANADA. 

“Kierkegaard wrote a marvelous thing in Either/Or. He said he feels that when he dies, they are going to ask him only one question, when he gets up there. And the question is, ‘Did you make things clear?’”

What happened was this:

We, the student body, decided to never speak again.

Do we know what film is about today? The ersatz cinema which fills theaters seems to tell us definitively: No. Stone’s film is much more than a cultural product of its time. It’s one of the best films of the 1990s and still has a great deal to teach us about how film works, and what it means to make a political film.  

Selected aphorisms, parables, & fragments from The Irreveries // Book 2 ~ Irreveries of a Deserter

“Nothing is healed or fixed: it is shattered and given back.”

These poems remind us how the literary past is always waiting for us in the literary future…

Imagine driving in your car listening to MJ on the radio, grooving and enjoying the song until … wait … you stop to ask yourself … was this bassline played manually by a human, because if MIDI sequencing was involved, I don't like it anymore. Said no one ever!

Most viewers, upon encountering Lamar Peterson’s work, will go no further than to subsume the paintings under the generic category of “black figuration.” This is to be expected; most people don’t care enough about art to actually look at it (whether they admit it to themselves or not).

It is the complexity of emotional registers, the playful ambiguity towards content, the energy of her formal immediacy, and her willingness to lean into the grotesque which together form the magnetism of her works. 

Although there's a reaction against utopian thinking, art itself has a utopian edge

In an art landscape populated by chalky paintings made by people who don't care enough about their medium to learn how to use it, crowded alongside paintings based on photos by people who think paintings are just images, it shouldn't be surprising that the gallery-going masses are titillated by a painting with a nice surface.

Rebecca Morris’s current show at Regen Projects, titled simply #34, after its place in the sequence of solo shows that constitutes the artist’s career evinces a painter who, having reached a certain stage of maturity, looks to take stock of the work she’s produced. How does it reflect her understanding of painting? What has held up and what is yet to convince?

Plantasia is a two-day ambient music fest held in Chicago named after Mort Garson's 1976 record, Mother Earth's Plantasia.

Now seems as good as any moment, as history breaks around us, to reconsider our attachments to modernism and formalism — along with the implications of such attachments — for the purpose of developing an art criticism that aspires to be adequate to the present.

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.