To be ‘cultured’ is also to dam up culture and become constipated.

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 girl fulfills an ideal, which presents a potential of connecting/relating myself to that ideal. The painting represents the ideal of naivete I seek to develop in and through art criticism.

The closure of public life provides a moment to reflect upon its usual reproduction, a question the club culture has not felt tasked to answer.

The National Cowboy Museum’s Twitter feed in the hands of Director of Security Tim Tiller is the kind of voice we crave during the COVID-19 lockdown. Tim’s sincere charm cuts through the digital cacophony and has earned the Museum three hundred thousand plus Twitter followers and global platform. But more importantly, it’s the voice we’ve needed from art museums for a long time.

Postmodernism can be characterized as a reaction to the negativity of modern art; it sees the violent separation of art and life and would like nothing more than to mend the wound that forced them apart.

Utility fosters distrust in those who wish to use the aesthetic for their own purposes. 

The nonbinding translations of today, those which attain a specious success (those we are too afraid to judge as bad — bad as translations, as poems) will not be forgiven. When they nestle into the dust of the archive, it will be as well-intentioned messages that exhaust themselves in what they say, not as artworks that continue to unfold in time.

Intellectualism sees institutions as trash islands damming up the river of life where cesspools fester, and wonders why humans don't instead amplify or store the energy of the river for the greater expanse of life. The academic is content to sniff the trash. Trash humping is an academic exercise.

The spasmodic beauty of abstraction reflects the social reality of capitalist production — a kind of rationality that is not yet rational enough.

“Kant was not a philosopher of art, but of freedom. Of what we could know, but do not yet know — and how even our instincts push us towards developing our faculties beyond them.” —Florian Walch

While many artists today position themselves as critical outsiders vis à vis capitalism, Hirst embraces the fact that he — and everyone else — lives smack dab in the middle of it. Far from being capitalism’s uncritical playboy, Hirst delivers an immanent critique.

What these three modes of aesthetic artifice/art/artistry have in common is an ugly obsession with purity. This makes Schneider’s analogy about religion and art especially worth investigation.

I wanted to approach the paintings and be absorbed in their depth, but they refused me, turning away from my senses. This was a new force, an ascetic ideal that fixed my place in an obdurate world.

The careless irony gives away the suffering narration involves in a world where it is no longer possible to tell stories.

Adnan has begun to worry the surface; she abolishes the impenetrability of her color. She is dealing with fresh problems that she has created for herself. This is one definition of freedom.

Let's not be chaste! Critics should strive for immanent dialectical critique, which has itself become desecrated. I can only imagine how many status quo readers will comment here that it’s not ‘relevant’ anymore; as in relevant to the status quo and conformed taste. And that is exactly the point.

The return of “art” to film even if such gestures are mere semblance, may indicate, however obliquely, a renewed desire to reconsider the medium.

And what do we make of the issue that our frustration is with realizing the futility of any radical gesture? That’s the problem of postmodernism in a nutshell.

For its entire modern history art was bound up in the possibility of freedom. So what happens when freedom no longer seems possible?