A collection of 6 posts
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.
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.
Chinatown is noir at its bleakest, yet most stylish.
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.”
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.
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.