We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. Even in times of “peace” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

Selected Spectral Works

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.

The continuing adventures of Octave.

Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are.

Meet Octave.

Caesura was invited by Montez Press Radio to contribute a segment of radio programming in July 2020.

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.

I died for Beauty — but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining Room

“Timelessness” must be unmasked as an exponent of the bourgeois concept of truth.

Our countertops shall be as spotless as spotlights are dramatic / on skim finished gallery walls.

Conceptualist art is making a last desperate attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of taste by plumbing remoter and remoter depths of subart — as though taste might not be able to follow that far down. And also as though boredom did not constitute an aesthetic judgment.

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.

Criticism tries to serve as a theoretical gunsight: what to aim at. And the gun is more like a catapult. It will have to clear the trees here on earth before it leaves the atmosphere.

When people today criticize the leaders of the American Revolution they only project their own narrowness and narcissism onto the conditions of the past. Had the American Revolution been defeated, in 1776 or in 1865, there would be no critique of present freedom possible today and no hope for any greater freedom in the future.

As Marx writes, “It is a matter of confession, no more. To have its sins forgiven mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are.”

Every work of art “is a window on all time.” Thomas Wolfe was an American Proust — his novels are the crystalline precipitate of a hypersensitive memory submerged within the substrate of the universal.

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.

I do not “use” the language. I interact with it. I do not communicate via language, but with it. Language is not a tool for me, but a medium infinitely larger than any intention.

Is Glenn Ligon a critic of identity politics, or a mouthpiece? Or is it that he is both, and ultimately neither?