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.

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

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 . . .

Genese Grill's introduction to her forthcoming essay collection, Portals (Splice).

“You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and mustache?” Picasso asked about the Vollard Suite, “That’s Rembrandt. Or maybe it’s Balzac; I’m not sure. It’s a compromise, I suppose. It doesn’t really matter. They’re only two of the people to haunt me. Every human being is a whole colony.”

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?

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.

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

A work of art has never graced the cover of the journal October. Since the first issue was published in 1976, the front cover has only ever carried the journal’s allusive title, spelled out in large capitalised letters underneath the smaller italicised headings of ‘art’, ‘theory’, ‘criticism’ and ‘politics’ (in that order).

To read Kerouac, especially his poetry, is to listen to an already posthumous message sent from himself to himself in the void after the end of speech…

It’s hard to be the Museum of Modern Art when the modern has become a thing of the past and a rather suspect thing at that.

But what of the museums themselves? The artworks, their placement, the hallways, the exhibits, the choreography of passing through?

Every year in April I am reminded of two monumental poetic works which begin with the Earth’s springtime renewal: The Canterbury Tales from 1400 and The Waste Land from 1922. 

El arte modernista para Trotsky no podía ser considerado como una nueva cultura sino más bien como una expresión de la tarea y demanda de trascender la sociedad y cultura burguesas.

We're casting about, looking for anything that could possibly make the world even slightly less terrible. It's not even that strange that our conversation about films is much louder and emotional than, say, immigration reform or tax policy or Wall Street regulation.

The spirit riding through the house of human memory. A taste of heavenliness still melancholy with lived sufferings. The hell of the present through which heaven is found — the finding of which is a middle-ground, and the site of personal, heretical, intense theology.

Frédéric sees the desk where his mother, now passed, did her business, shoved unopened mail, searched for a pen, locked away in a glass case. “Doesn't it seem caged?”

Cualquiera puede solamente verse beneficiado por una buena traducción, porque una traducción actúa sobre y retroactivamente transforma el original.