To Take Up the Incomprehensible
In the end an artwork can teach us, as a form of social knowledge, about how we experience our own experience in the face of the total industrial domination of life and, of course, art.
Artworks: A Closed System?
Being ambitious about art criticism is really about trying to grasp what has not been grasped, even and especially by the artists themselves.
Taste and Transformation
The disintegration of art criticism does not have a single locus. But it does coincide with another decline: the decline of the political Left as an active force in the shaping of history.
The Closed-Eyes Listener and The Forty Part Motet
I propose that the truthful joy of The Forty Part Motet is rather more sober, clinical and above all alienated than the sublime or transcendent categories projected onto it.
Karl Fousek: Pattern Variation
Like much new experimental electronic music, Fousek is the result of a generation of ‘sound artists’ who find it necessary to return to the origins of electronic music.
To Make the Minor Major: On Giorgio Morandi
Minor artworks fulfill a current need and inevitably conform to what might be termed a ‘minor consciousness’ of our contemporary era.
Cian: Strain Studies
Strain Studies indeed sounds strained and tense, definitely not easy listening. But, at the same time, it seems to be verging on a complete and lively spontaneity.