Last July, I was invited by Steffen Andrae, Hans Innenhof, and Günther Mailand to contribute a piece of criticism to the third edition of a series of concept shows organized by Mailand / Innenhof at Kontor 80, an experimental exhibition hall and event space in Leipzig, Germany.

Brass music is regarded as alternatively innocuous or intrusive entertainment music, as meaningless droning; it evokes a sense of community by referring to so-called traditions and, above all, by inviting collective marching and clapping. In doing so, it only creates the illusion of bonds between people.

Artistic montage, as discussed by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Kluge, deals with questions regarding the relationship between individual elements, especially with respect to images and scenes. In radical montage, the respective components often point beyond their specific material substrate to some sort of socio-philosophical or historical constellation.

There is a now quite famous moment in Les Blank’s documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, in which the narrator quotes the German director as stating that, “Everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.” Not a bad slogan for a modernist program . . .

Rosenfeld’s treatment of Freimuth’s video recording, which is both poetic and critical, follows the notion of the historical materialist as presented by Brecht’s friend Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Film as historical research does not mean recognizing “how it actually was.”

I do not like 80064. I do not like watching it over and over again for the purpose of this essay. It’s pornographic raw tape of the unmediated real deal. Bullying an old man is a lazy stand-in for the work of art. It would be better to live in in a world in which this video does not exist. But it does.

The first Ferris wheel, named after its inventor, the bridge builder and railroad engineer George Ferris, was built in 1893 for the World’s Fair in Chicago. Two years later, the Lumière brothers premiered the first production of their cinematograph in Paris with the short film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

Trotsky implemented the useful metaphor that art and politics are “fellow travelers". That is, they pursue the same goal of freedom, but by different means.

That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on.

The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?

There’s something pathetic about contemporary attempts to paint the present as an opportunity for art. Too late! If all it takes to “change” art is a change in the American president, there’s not much there to change. This is indeed an opportunity, but it is a shallow opportunity. If change might so easily be had, why was this opportunity not posed in 2020? Better yet, 2016?

My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .

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?

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).

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 . . .

“…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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .