Much like the old wars of religion that shaped Europe, the new wars are fought on the ground of the image.
Resolved to reconcile the simultaneous horror and beauty of home, William Christenberry began the annual pilgrimages back south.
The image moved me: Robert E. Lee, that icon of the Confederacy, whose likeness in bronze once towered several stories over New Orleans, was, after 132 years, gone, relegated (for now) to municipal storage.
Life at prestissimo requires moments of adagio, even of larghissimo.
Why do dreams, aside from those that prove uncannily prophetic, not befit our biography?
The death and life of the great American hipster offers an alternative history of culture over the last quarter century.
Food is a strong proof of our animality; it is equally strong evidence of how we transcend it.
We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer.
At their core, cryptids represent the triumph of the particular over the generic.
We have automated the society of clues to act on its own divinations, with consequences far beyond the individual.
Every society in history has limited speech in some way, yet some have remained freer than others.
The humanities may have suddenly mattered more than ever, but their support was also as fragile as it had been for decades.
Far beyond the opera house and the concert hall, we are living in a world Wagner helped make.
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
All modern forms of government presume an objectification of their citizens.
Hunting after the “hidden life of learning,” Zena Hitz defends learning for its own sake.
I envision a world in which the increased fragmentation of our media scene leads, over time, to the rise of new institutions that are built on stronger foundations.
The meaning of performative in contemporary parlance is almost exactly the opposite of the word’s original meaning.
Concern with authenticity seems to be unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchies.
Is love so discrete and impregnable that it can subsist in the midst of the most repellent undertakings?
We used to want to assimilate into the mainstream. Now identity is front and center of what we want the world to know about us.
Augustine is crucial to determining the continuity and dissimilarity between the Romans and ourselves.
We can’t properly define the Enlightenment without making reference to happiness.
Studying art taught me to think differently about medical procedures.
Carrying forward an evolving “we” of the democratic imagination.
Nouns became verbs, verbs became nouns, and both became passive and adjectival.
What Pleasants found in the Afro-American idiom was a body of music intended to comfort the afflicted.
Transparent has become one of the staples of our commercial discourse, a form of bureaucratic-corporate-therapeutic-speak.
Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb is a casualty of both the Cold War and its aftermath.
Travel is a way of acquiring lifetimes; travel writing, doubly so.
To begin a sentence is to launch into the void and syntax plays a large role in how you will land.
The actual exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein was far less cordial than the film’s version.
It’s nice to think that a gift like that possessed by Ella Fitzgerald will always find its way. But luck matters too.
Thomas Lynch may be the only major poet-undertaker writing in English, which must count as a surprise.
Instead of satire, which aims at improvement, we have snark.
The ten thousand photographs stored on a cellphone are a dramatic refutation of my photographic diffidence.
It strikes me as a great loss that students today do not share in the great sublimity of their own humanity.
The self-examination prompted by Malick’s films might lead to a place beyond philosophy.
Ravelstein is not simply a reactionary call to return to characteristically premodern ways of life.
What is lost in translation can be recovered if one begins to understand the nuances and significance of what has been placed on the margins.
Svetlana Alpers’s value judgments show her colors as a critic, although formally her métier in the late 1970s was still that of the art historian.
Though careful observation comes first, my process involves research: detecting palimpsests in the architecture or observing how people move and inhabit the place.
A monkey's selfie has done more than just raise awareness about an endangered species.
That Edvard Munch never met Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the great missed encounters of the modern age.
Pantone's Marsala is no mauve, but it does reflect our present cultural mood.
To reduce a museum experience to the laws of supply and demand devalues not only the art itself but also the curators’ years of education and expertise—connoisseurship on which we rely in institutions that position themselves as cultural arbiters.
When El Greco heard the insultingly low valuation for his work, he launched a long and bitter court battle that quietly changed the perception of artists and art in Spain.
Taylor Swift’s recent trademarking frenzy is another example of how artists are scrambling to maintain control over their work in the face of the digital tsunami.
Cubism’s stylistic hegemony—the dislocated binaries, the tactile surfaces in a two-dimensional work, and the distortions—interferes with what we want to understand about what few clues we can decipher.
If technology rarely delivers on its claims, then need we waste so much as a backward glance as we dash ahead to the next digital milestone?
New Orleans, where spectacle and transgression are part of the infrastructure, is the ideal place to conduct completely unscientific research on tattooing.
Using photos from old magazines makes for a vulnerable working surface, since the paper usually is old, yellowed, and somewhat brittle. I like it that this quality emphasizes the human and personal vulnerability that exists as a subject in my work.
“The world just flipped itself over with hardly any recognition of the tentacles it would sprout”—from an interview with artist Rosamond Casey, whose work appears in our spring issue.
The solitude of sickness is not a waste of time but rather a compression of it, a bundle the size of a pill bottle.
The man who approached me on Chartres Street looked like he’d been tossed away.
Henry James’s fiction shows how aesthetic misjudgments can be connected to moral vice.
The secrets of Jerusalem are also lodged in Jacksonville, Joplin, and Joliet
Where is culture that gave humanity the symphonies and operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov?
We can learn from the outdated Western Civ model, even as we transcend it.
Jean-Luc Godard, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is worth paying attention to even when we think his work is bad
What we are seeing, then, is a fictional spectacle—a pseudo-iconoclastic event.
In the output of the AI generated image, the technique is there but the techne is not.
If there is a war between database and narrative in Cervantes and Sterne, it is a merry one.
It took the roiling events of 1963 to open the ears and hearts of the American public to the Beatles.
The cultural legacy of Bruno Schulz.
Could we ban cell phone photography in museums and at performances?
Is it possible to imagine the ballet world without a primary teleology of aesthetic perfectionism and a baseline of low self-worth?
What are the implications for any society that emphasizes monuments to power and domination over imagination and the arts?
There is a poignant vulnerability to dereliction pipe organs face in a world saturated with synthetically produced musical sound.
A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.
You read a poem and it awakens you to something that you already knew.
Scheherazade’s story is about stories themselves.
The unlikely connection between podcast studios, Renaissance libraries and man-caves.
The vinyl record signifies a larger world of which the audible dimension of music is only one part.
SNL’s contemporary standing as an established institution has somewhat obscures its initial trailblazing daring.
Singing is not to be understood as an aesthetic sweetener.