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 20 Sep 2024 · 27 min read
Roman Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ Fifty Years On Chinatown is noir at its bleakest, yet most stylish. Ralph Leonard 13 Aug 2024 · 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 30 Mar 2024 · 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 4 Sep 2023 · 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 29 Dec 2021 · 12 min read
