Fleshing Out Music, Eros, & Reason
We may want opera, but are we capable of loving enough for it?
Taking Stock: First Month of Caesura
At Caesura, we are still making sense of who our audience is and who it can be.
Critique of Revolutionary Art: Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno, and Greenberg
Modernist art for Trotsky could not be considered a new culture but rather an expression of the task and demand for transcending bourgeois society and culture.
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?
On Art, Hopelessness, and Crisis, Part I
We have been a society in despair for quite some time. And without meaningful social existence, without the political possibility of imagining a better world, what possibilities are there for art?
Two, Three, Many Octobers: The Vanquished Tradition of the Avant-Garde, Part II
In pursuit of some kind of deliverance, the avant-garde had undertaken to record the endless parade of human suffering as it appeared in both the costume of a present ‘now’ and in the torn, worn-out rags of an unresolved past.
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.
Translation as Conquest, Part II
The past doesn’t disappear into the present but thunders into oblivion along with it. The present is meant by the past, even if it’s not the future that the past had in mind.
The Most Constipated Man: Aesthetics in the Belly of a Worm
To be ‘cultured’ is also to dam up culture and become constipated.
“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 Naive Critic
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.
Individual Channels
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.
What Do Museums Have to Say to “The Public”?
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.
Two, Three, Many Octobers, The Vanquished Tradition of the Avant-Garde, Part I
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.
The New Relevance of Past Art
Utility fosters distrust in those who wish to use the aesthetic for their own purposes.
Translation as Conquest, Part I
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.
The Academic Plague
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.
What’s So Wrong About Cats?
The spasmodic beauty of abstraction reflects the social reality of capitalist production — a kind of rationality that is not yet rational enough.
The Rebirth of Beauty
“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
Damien Hirst: The Best Living Artist
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.