Patrick Zapien will present a lecture on Theodor Adorno’s “Draft Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory. The lecture will focus on the dialectic of freedom in art, its historical crisis, and how that crisis appears as the enigmatic essence of art in modernity.

Caesura hosts an online panel on “The Crisis of Art Criticism", featuring Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review, Troy Sherman of Midwest Art Quarterly, and Gareth Thomas Kaye of Chicago Spleen.

Today, there is really no urgency to reflect on Jon McNaughton’s body of work. Adam Lehrer’s recent article in Compact, “The Limits of MAGA Art,'' stakes this out clearly. There is much less danger to endorsing McNaughton in the midst of a failing Biden presidency than there was at the height of anti-Trump hysteria . . . Why address it at all then?

“The force or spirit that passes through you and then leaves something to inhabit and grow in you, and when it grows large enough you will pass it out from you, give birth to it.”

“We gleam with listening.”

In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967).

“It is another day.”

“the best music always comes from somewhere else”

Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .

A vision of the grotesque, our morbid fascination with violence, and the aestheticization of war…

“El Desdichado” doesn’t quite work through melancholy but gives form and refuge to it.

“…the triptych painfully reminds us that the form today signifies a broken totality that can only be unified, at best, by an act of artistic creation.”

And I wondered if I was awake or asleep, if it was the moon's paleness or Lucifer's, if it was midnight or dawn!

As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics

It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.

Is it possible Jurassic Park’s innovative special effects overshadow its true artistic depth?

“Film is, for me, an art of composition.”

In memory of Brice Marden (1938-2023)

“She’s trying to paint me into a corner with her question mark army. She’s wanting to light my pants on fire. She seems super mad at me.“

Why is it that so much writing on art today — ostensibly criticism — only skates on the surface of artworks, providing description, identifying a handful subjects and themes, maybe some precedents, and then a conclusion — or rather, an ending. The writing stops.