Lecture on Adorno’s “Draft Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory
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.
“The Crisis of Art Criticism” Panel
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.
A Response to Adam Lehrer’s “The Limits of MAGA Art”
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?
Donald Judd: Crisis of the Aesthetic
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).
Richard Diebenkorn: “Works on Paper” at L.A. Louver
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 . . .
Wicked Attraction
A vision of the grotesque, our morbid fascination with violence, and the aestheticization of war…
Simon Dinnerstein and His Wings
“…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.”
Selections from Gaspard de la Nuit
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!
Hearing in the Present Tense: On La Monte Young's Orphic Revolution
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
The Lonely Eye
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.
Blackest Black Birthday
“She’s trying to paint me into a corner with her question mark army. She’s wanting to light my pants on fire. She seems super mad at me.“
Gnostalgia for the Present
The 17th series in the ongoing collaboration between George Quasha’s preverbs and Susan Quasha’s photographic work.
Four Poems from Tentacular Cities
Four poems from Émile Verhaeren’s Tentacular Cities (1895) translated from the French by Jacob Siefring.