Front Cover
Front Cover: Detail of Anna Sebastian, What We May Also Do, 2024. Mixed media on paper mounted on ply, 170 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Verdurin, London
Art Worlds
The Cart Pulling the Horse
Saint-Simon’s vision is rarely invoked today but his vision of the willing synergy between art and capital has, indeed, come true.
Playing the Rules
The art world has been recognized as a kind of living theater in which the emotional lives of the players, their intellectual differences, passions, liaisons, alliances and schisms, are as much a part of the story of art as what ends up hanging on the gallery wall.
Reflections from Theodor Adorno’s Unbuilt House in Pacific Palisades
The inconspicuousness of these houses defies any simplistic, even stereotyping, expectations that émigrés would have opted for modernist architecture, or even for fellow émigré modernist architects as the designers of their homes in exile.
A Political Artist
By drawing attention to the aesthetics of stacking, Sean Scully gives real recognition to the dignity of physical labor.
Objects of History
Job Market: A Memoir
Everyone hated the war, faculty and students alike, but the former, especially among the World War II veterans, did not approve of the way the latter chose to oppose it.
Lincoln & Jefferson, Too
Lincoln, like Giambattista Vico, was a preservationist who feared that the American republic would not be immune to the cyclical turns of decay; Jefferson, like Edward Gibbon, had greater confidence in the continuous upward movement of ideas and society.
On Settler Colonialism
Beneath a deep sense of cultivated alienation often lurks the potential for violence, or at least for the glorification of violence, since few people can sustain a sense of severe personal guilt without experiencing a corresponding desire to do something cathartic to remove that stain from themselves.
Presidents and Tycoons
Theodore Roosevelt borrowed the phrase “muckrakers” from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Exploitation Past and Present
A tourist’s encounter with New Orleans street performers dancing for Mardi Gras beads opens a wormhole to the compulsory entertainment provided by nineteenth-century slaves.
Literary Lives
Understanding The Senex
In the Hindu tradition, for instance, an appropriate acceptance of the roles of the life cycle, the Ashrama, is the path to happiness and fulfillment in life.
The Resilience of Sicilian Puppet Theater
Mimmo Cuticchio is well-known beyond the confines of Sicily not only for staging the Paladins of France cycle, but also for creatively adapting canonical dramatic narratives across time and space, from the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Macbeth, to A Thousand and One Nights.
All Sporting Endeavor Aspires to the Condition of a Fight
Body’s determined effort to empathize with the downtrodden—to expose, explore, and explain the deprivations and excesses of American ambition—is unarbitrated, unvarnished, unflinching, and inimitable.
An Immaculate Blend of Art and Pedagogy
With shots of Dante accompanied by Virgil actually moving throughout his narrative, up the dark forest mountain, then through the gate of hell, seeing Charon and Minos, and then weeping Francesca as well as state-of-the-art sound and effects, one has an extremely immersive aesthetic experience.
Folio
Poetry translated by A.M. Juster from the Chinese of Li Bai
