Art Archives - Page 10 of 17

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Beyond Ekphrasis

Writing your heart out in a museum

January 18, 2018 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Enter any museum, traditional, contemporary, technological, scientific, historical, and you see people moving slowly, standing quietly, observing. All well and good. People arrive in museums to learn and understand art. They study the installation; they ingest the presented explanation and interpretation. Perfectly reasonable and expected. As a young person taken to ...

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The Power of Affects in Democratic Politics

Manuel Puig’s ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ and the affective turn in democratic theory

January 8, 2018 • by Gustavo Hessmann Dalaqua

The so-called “affective turn” in political theory has recently propelled several scholars to cast aspersions on the deliberative model of democracy. [i] By affirming that democracy should be conceived solely as an exchange of arguments between “reasonable” persons guided by the ideal of “impartiality,” deliberative theorists such as Habermas and Rawls, it ...

The Power of Affects in Democratic Politics

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Russian Absurd

A glimpse into the notebooks of the modernist avant-garde artist Daniil Kharms translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale

December 18, 2017 • by Alex Cigale

From the Letters (1933) Monday October 16, 1933. Petersburg. Talent grows, destroying, building. The sign of stagnation is well-being. Dear Klavdia Vasilevna, You are a remarkable and genuine person! As much as it grieves me not to be able to see you, I won’t be inviting you to the Children’s Theater or to come to my city. How heartwarming ...

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Utopoly

A utopian design game

December 18, 2017 • by Neil Farnan

Since Hayek’s Road to Serfdom managed to conflate planning with totalitarianism, the use of design in utopian discourse can cause concern in some quarters, suggesting a master-plan or blueprint model. However, Hayek’s concern was with the failure of planning rather than its success. The irony was that a key component of capitalist ...

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In Memoriam

Ashbery’s poetic cosmopolitanism

December 11, 2017 • by David Micah Greenberg

Rimbaud’s Illuminations also presents the city as object of inspiration and denigration. Take the opening of “Metropolitan” (here translated by Ashbery): From the indigo strait to the seas of Ossian, on the pink and orange sand bathed by the wine-colored sky, crystal boulevards rise up and intersect, immediately populated by poor ...

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Trump’s Head and Women’s Blood

Is Kathy Griffin’s controversial image a work of protest art?

December 2, 2017 • by Lisa Aslanian

Kathy Griffin released a picture of herself, wearing a navy or royal blue pussy-bow blouse and holding up a faux severed and bleeding head of Donald Trump. How to describe her gaze? Emotionless? Steely? Resolved. I am not going to spend this essay defending the image or deconstructing the fallout around ...

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The Anxiety of Poetry

Interpreting the Jill Bialosky scandal

November 29, 2017 • by Sarah V. Schweig

The poem goes on addressing the dead: “You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,/ Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;/ Blind force with accomplished shape.” War starkly polarizes whole peoples into friends and enemies and has the power to twist human values: In ...

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Translation Can Be a Peculiar Drug

Isaac Babel’s ‘Guy de Maupassant’ retranslated

November 29, 2017 • by Val Vinokur

Babel writes: “A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You must turn it once, but not twice . . . I started talking of style, ...

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(un-)imaging

Or: why the blank page is a lure in imagining the new

November 27, 2017 • by Pierre Schwarzer

In a dark room, projected onto a wall, we see the hands of a man, dressed in black, on a wooden table. In crisp detail, we see him holding a page from a magazine, with some advertisement on it. Slowly, the page is being crumpled, we hear the whispers of ...

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John Reed, Romantic Revolutionary

The persistent timeliness of the poet and activist

November 7, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

October 22, was the 130th anniversary of his birth. He only lived to the age of 33, but in those few years he accomplished the work of more than a single lifetime. For the next half century Ten Days would define how much of the world came to understand the ...

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Speculation and Counter-speculation

From value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption

October 12, 2017 • by Joshua Simon

Finance is speculation on debt. In the past decades, finance has replaced production, while debt has replaced waged labor as the main generator of profit in the contemporary economy. Under the reign of production, labor-time aimed to semiotize value. In other words, each terrain of human activity was assigned a ...