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 . . .
Black Sun of Melancholy
“El Desdichado” doesn’t quite work through melancholy but gives form and refuge to it.
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.
Recombinant Reels: Reassessing Jurassic Park’s 3D Revival
Is it possible Jurassic Park’s innovative special effects overshadow its true artistic depth?
Crisis of Criticism
Why is it that so much writing on art today — ostensibly criticism — only skates on the surface of artworks, providing description, identifying a handful subjects and themes, maybe some precedents, and then a conclusion — or rather, an ending. The writing stops.
Sense and Non-Sense
The main problem that the artist encounters at work — the source of all their woes and triumphs — is that materials must be transformed: made to give what they cannot. Appearance is the mask of the true face beneath.
Painting as a Scaffold
The most recent idea that appeared to me, so insistently that I felt compelled to write it down, was of painting as a scaffold. This was related to an older idea of mine, of painting as a veil . . .
What was Post-Internet?: An Interview with Ann Hirsch and Parker Ito
“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.”
A Dialogue on Music
Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain discuss musical composition and their albums Drunk Walks and What Goes Away.
The Unadorned Life is Not Worth Living
Genese Grill reviews Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889–1914.
In Conversation with Elisa Jensen
Caesura editors Patrick Zapien and Gabriel Almeida talk to Elisa Jensen about her practice.