Arrest and Moral Pageantry
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Mick Jagger, and the theatre of degradation.
Julia Friedman
· 8 min read
Art History
A collection of 7 posts
The Art of Not Quite Listening
Ian Penman has published an eccentric new book about Erik Satie, a French surrealist composer and celebratory nuisance with a tiny oeuvre and massive influence.
Thomas Larson
· 9 min read
The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty
After Duchamp, the art world came to view the pursuit of beauty as naïve and gravitated toward political art in their search for meaning. But this is a Faustian bargain: you can have meaning, but you do not get to make it for yourself.
Megan Gafford
· 27 min read
Roman Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ Fifty Years On
Chinatown is noir at its bleakest, yet most stylish.
Ralph Leonard
· 9 min read
Narcissism for All
Forty-five years ago, Christopher Lasch identified what has become a defining feature of modern activism—“the ever-present, neurotic need to be recognized and affirmed.”
Julia Friedman
· 10 min read
But is it a Bernini? A Tale of Contested Identity in the Art World
How the bronze crucifix in the Art Gallery of Ontario got from seventeenth-century Rome to twenty-first century Toronto is an intriguing tale, but it is a narrative filled with gaps.
Jonathan Salem-Wiseman
· 11 min read
Remembering Berlin’s Post-Communist Art Colony—Before It Became ‘Kitsch for the Rich’
The Berlin winter sky is orange one evening as we turn off Oranienburger Strasse into Tacheles courtyard, where a Trabant is planted nose-first in the sand, a laconic memorial to a lifestyle that no longer exists.
Ulrich Gutmair
· 12 min read