Features
The Egalitarian Vision of Nativity Scenes
In all its artistic iterations across millennia, the nativity remains inherently political in its depiction of God choosing to enter the world in marginalized circumstances.
Ed Simon
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for LitHub, and the author of Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (2024).
Opinion
A Visual History of No Kings
From the destruction of King George III's statue to today's No Kings movement, resistance to tyranny has always demanded aesthetic subversion.
Opinion
Maurizio Cattelan Is No Duchamp
One elevated the prosaic. The other merely gilded the familiar.
Opinion
The Algorithmic Presidency
Just as 20th-century fascists deployed radio and film, today’s ideological descendants use memes, social media, and above all, artificial intelligence.
Comics
An Unfinished History of the Antichrist
The sinister figure was shaped by social and political forces throughout the centuries. Is he still walking among us?
Opinion
The Tackiness of Evil
More than a testament to his tastelessness, Trump’s demolition of the White House tells the American people: I can do whatever I want with the past.
Opinion
Homeland Security’s Genocidal Aesthetics
By posting paintings like “American Progress,” the DHS signals its white supremacist beliefs.
Features
Bidding Adieu to Art Deco’s Democratic Dream
A century later, the decline of the movement represents the death of the grand designs it traded in.
Opinion
Donald Trump’s Cultural Revolution
The difference between this revolution and those in Germany, China, or Iran, is not of kind, but of degree, and only so far.
Opinion
Pope Francis’s Aesthetics of Humility
He chose a simple white cassock over velvet robes, disseminated photos of him kneeling before inmates and refugees, and believed in art as an intrinsic human right.
Art
Clara Peeters’s Still Lifes Are Even Better Than the Real Thing
In her paintings, the 17th-century Dutch painter captured a pure, crystalline moment of time with unnerving verisimilitude.
Art
A Glimpse of Eternity at the Carnegie Museum’s Hall of Architecture
The assembling of these plaster casts of masterpieces more than a century ago must be understood as a work of art in its own right, a bizarre and beautiful triumph.