Victor Cova introduces a 1941 exchange between Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton.

Visiting the Noguchi Museum recently, I was struck by the difficulty of sculpture as art: how it's constrained by its physical presence to a degree that other media, like music, painting, and poetry, are not.

Charles Ray is unquestionably one of the most powerful and challenging sculptors alive. His recent works presented at the Met carry within them a subtle and expansive understanding of space, a boundless wit and delicacy, and a deep sense of history.

After Effect — James Turrell’s latest “Wedgework” (recently presented by Pace) — takes up this question of the imaginary dimensions of time and space and their relationship to perception, memory, and thought.

The potential of this kind of work lies in its ability to pervert reality. This is not to say distort reality, to make it into a “cruel illusion,” but transform it: to manipulate and reconfigure reality according to one’s impulses and for its own sake.

Cinema remains the least understood of major arts. So often film commentaries discuss mostly, or only, the plot. But to begin to understand any film, one must examine it as cinema, shot by shot, edit by edit, in terms of composition, lighting, movement, editing rhythms and juxtapositions, and more, because the way the viewer sees its depictions affects how one feels and thinks about what is shown

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.

NFTs are the next stage in cultural phenomena the Caesura founding editors have been following for more than a decade.

How did Amacher ultimately feel about being identified as a heroic “sound artist” instead of a hardworking composer who underwent a heroic rescue mission into the deepest undercurrents of music history?

It is full of work convinced that the world as we know it is doddering towards its end, but gives little consideration to the possibility that it is this old New Museum and old new media art, not the world around it, that has run its course.

NFTs reveal that relational aesthetics and post-internet art have always been the same phenomenon, differing merely in surface technique and taste.

Art is the vanguard of capital.

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century.

If society no longer reliably yields a consistent aesthetic framework, and if even the immediate sensations of our own minds can no longer be trusted, how can we hope to reach the inner truth of an artwork?

“Art has to have a sense of pleasure and danger, of stretching limitations and perceptions.”

For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task.

“The category of experience connects original composition to translation. Just as poets shape their experience into a poem, the translator shapes a more specific experience, the experience of the original poem, into the translation.”

maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.

The view of art underlying the essay, and the type of film that remains my principal, though not only, model for greatness in cinema, have themselves been bypassed by much that has happened since, in particular the emphasis on the politics of an artwork, and on various aspects of the artist's identity rather than complexity of internal form.

It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another.