For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task.

The view of art underlying the essay, and the type of film that remains my principal, though not only, model for greatness in cinema, have themselves been bypassed by much that has happened since, in particular the emphasis on the politics of an artwork, and on various aspects of the artist's identity rather than complexity of internal form.

A work of art has never graced the cover of the journal October. Since the first issue was published in 1976, the front cover has only ever carried the journal’s allusive title, spelled out in large capitalised letters underneath the smaller italicised headings of ‘art’, ‘theory’, ‘criticism’ and ‘politics’ (in that order).

How do we know something really happened unless it is recreated and simplified dramatically by a diverse ensemble cast, headed by Jeff Daniels, and captured on blue tinted film?

To read Kerouac, especially his poetry, is to listen to an already posthumous message sent from himself to himself in the void after the end of speech…

When Meow Wolf’s claim to fame, House of Eternal Return, hatched in March 2016, the art world was forced to confront the monster that two decades of discourse around socially-engaged art had unwittingly created.

“Critique is an exploration of conditions of possibility for freedom in transformation.”

It’s hard to be the Museum of Modern Art when the modern has become a thing of the past and a rather suspect thing at that.

But what of the museums themselves? The artworks, their placement, the hallways, the exhibits, the choreography of passing through?

Sofia Coppola doesn't seem to work so much with “the female gaze,” whatever that might mean. She doesn't watch women so much as she watches men watching women.

The experience is absolute; a demonstration is made of the presence of an incomplete reality to which its image is opposed by the intervention of a motor element condensing the real and the virtual into a superior unity.

Every year in April I am reminded of two monumental poetic works which begin with the Earth’s springtime renewal: The Canterbury Tales from 1400 and The Waste Land from 1922. 

Every creation has resonance beyond itself. Our participation in nature is a creative act by which nature knows its further nature, as we know our own.

To create something new, at best, is to give an intimation of the potential that is obstructed, and hence, by a contrast however faint, to draw attention to the obstruction and the pain it induces.

El arte modernista para Trotsky no podía ser considerado como una nueva cultura sino más bien como una expresión de la tarea y demanda de trascender la sociedad y cultura burguesas.

“If there has ever been a present to work in spite of, it is ours, but how different was that of the late nineteenth century? Or rather, is there a present? No such thing, thought Mallarmé — just a gap that the news tries to paper over.“

n+1 Editor Marco Roth responds to Caesura’s Issue 0 prompt.

The spirit riding through the house of human memory. A taste of heavenliness still melancholy with lived sufferings. The hell of the present through which heaven is found — the finding of which is a middle-ground, and the site of personal, heretical, intense theology.

Michel Leiris’s 1929 essay on the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, translated by Rainer Hanshe.

Frédéric sees the desk where his mother, now passed, did her business, shoved unopened mail, searched for a pen, locked away in a glass case. “Doesn't it seem caged?”