Annie Bourneuf’s Beyond the Angel of History brilliantly shows that the significance of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” may still be hidden.
Walter Benjamin
Posted inBooks
A Deep Dive Into Walter Benjamin
The Benjamin Files by Fredric Jameson explains everything by reference to everything else, in a way that often makes the narrative all but impenetrable.
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The Last of the Storytellers
In his fiction, Nikolai Leskov writes as if he is overhearing the stories being told.
Posted inArt
The Work of Art in the Age of the Internet
How will the internet transform the way that contemporary visual art is created?
Posted inArt
Walter Benjamin on How to Stop Worrying and Love Late Capitalism
Benjamin’s gargantuan Arcades Project brims with philosophical propositions, poetic digressions, lyrical aphorisms, and experimental theses.
Posted inArt
An Exhibition Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Arcades Project’
Opening on March 17 at the Jewish Museum, The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin intends to reflect the sprawling text in both content and form.
Posted inArt
Hanne Darboven Reflects the Infinite Feeling of History
The artist’s “Kulturegeschichte 1880–1983” (“Cultural History 1880–1983”) is a seemingly endless archive that renders the viewer mute.
Posted inBooks
Reader’s Diary: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Sonnets’
In 1913, the young Walter Benjamin struck up an intense friendship with the poet Christoph Friedrich Heinle — one of the most enigmatic episodes in Benjamin’s enigmatic life.
Posted inArt
The Tender Playfulness of Paul Klee
PARIS — The key to Paul Klee’s wonderfully shaped energy is not ironic detachment, as the title of the Centre Pompidou’s current retrospective suggests, but rather the playful and idyllic emotion he transmits through masterly line and dusty color.
Posted inArt
The 9th Berlin Biennale: A Vast Obsolescent Pageant of Irrelevance
BERLIN — BB9 is so vacuous, ideologically apathetic, ahistorical, sarcastic, and dehumanizing, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been blacklisted solely on account of its conformity to commodity fetishism.
Posted inArt
Thinking of Magazines as Art Objects
On average, we probably encounter magazines more frequently than art. To equate them, though, isn’t common practice. Is a New Yorker cartoon just a quirky little illustration, or is it a defining style of both humor and drawing that has become iconic not just of the weekly, but of the history of cartooning? Is a fashion spread in Harper’s Bazaar just luscious eye candy coxing consumers to buy clothes, or is it the collaborative result of aesthetic visionaries in the demanding creative fields of photography, creative direction and fashion? Are magazines glossy periodicals filled with ads, or are they works of art with revolutionary potential?
