Abuse of Weakness
Love makes you a stranger to yourself, and the best any of us can hope for is someone good and kind willing to catch you from that existential fall.
Anvil and Rose 2
Our second installment of Anvil and Rose! Hermann Van den Reeck reviews five books of poetry from Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Don Mee Choi, Natalie Díaz, Tommy Blount, and Eduardo Corral.
Anvil and Rose 1
Watt on books by Bob Arnold, Jericho Brown, Carolyn Forché, Patricia Colleen Murphy, and Fernando Pessoa.
Harold Ancart and Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner
These are landscapes without landscape — pure ideas of how a picture is painted, of how a landscape is formed as an image.
The Sad Lament of the Brave Review
In these new pictures by Julian Schnabel, we see the present state of painting: abandoned like unfortunate refuse, making do with what it has, left to its own devices, to elaborate what still remains within it.
Angel of Kindness, Have You Tasted Hate?: On Darja Bajagić
Though Bajagić’s work may not escape certain tropes of avant-gardist art, it manages to capture pockets of discomfort, images charged with ambivalent energy.
The Worst of COVID Art
Art about or responding to the COVID pandemic may simply be destined to be bad, but some things truly stand out. Caesura chimes in on the worst.
Those Who Come After…And Before
The social role of poetry has always been a question, but it has not always been posed explicitly as a question.
Brás Cubas’s Theory of Human Editions
Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs are a de-composition, so to speak, a gnawing of the source material that their author had encountered both in literature and in society.
A New Channel: David Lynch’s Weather Reports
David Lynch has an impeccable ability to generate an attuned viewer. His Weather Reports show that he can do so in less than a minute. Even more than that, they illustrate the extent to which Lynch is a devout practitioner of art.
Reflections on Kanye West’s “Wash Us in The Blood”
If West’s works are ever “soothing,” it’s precisely because they do often succeed in revealing something true about the world, something we can relate to as listeners. If critics feel that “Wash Us in the Blood” fails to hit the mark, then, it must be for a different reason.
Staring at the Sun: Arthur Jafa’s “Love is the Message”
Jafa’s omnipotent sun of tradition is there to remind us that what is considered freedom now is merely the allowance we are given to be a controlled emanation of society as it exists.
Critical Art or Kum Ba Ya?
Is Glenn Ligon a critic of identity politics, or a mouthpiece? Or is it that he is both, and ultimately neither?
A Simple but Ambitious Plan
Anne Carson conquers Euripides’ radical attempt to destroy and redeem his culture and history, but for modern times and modern men — modern men who suffer from an overfullness of experience that impoverishes them.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace
Contemporary commonsense says that the preservation of art — as art — is not a life and death situation, but consider the case of Andrew Cunanan.
Nicole Eisenman: “Tonight We Are Going Out And We Are All Getting Hammered” @ RISD Museum
Eisenman’s contribution asserts that for aesthetic experience, liking and knowing are often indistinguishable, even though the museum, as a bourgeois pedagogical invention, upholds an aura of implicit hierarchy between the two.
Trying to Understand untitled-game
Like those born at the turn of this century, untitled-game is overwrought with anxiety about its own emptiness. This reflects the fear of one’s own emptiness. Are we up to the tasks of our own century?
The Shape of Confusion in Joni Murphy's Double Teenage
Two girls set out to live life. They adapt themselves to different roles within girlhood, but never attain to a fullness of any role.
“On the Right Side of History”: Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana and the Gauntlet of Cultural Liberalism
The culture industry is running on a marathon of apologies. Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift biopic on Netflix, is a prime example of pop-culture apologia bound up in a coming-of-age tale.
The New Relevance of Past Art
Utility fosters distrust in those who wish to use the aesthetic for their own purposes.