1. The foundational background of all engagement is culture, the one we’re embedded in, the one we seek to promote. Culture is the practice in equilibrium of the ways in which we encounter the world, and each other. Social engagement is a proposal on the contents and context of (that) culture. It’s not so much … Continue reading
Category Archives: Art Criticism
On Necessity, Sufficiency, and Rules
The thing that’s got people pissed off today is that there are no longer any necessary or sufficient conditions for art. The other thing that’s got people pissed off today is that there never were. There were only, ever, rules. Continue reading
On Bad Art as Journeyman
I need my bad work to walk ahead of me, to light the trashed road ahead. I need my bad work to trail close behind me, to catch me in error and to sheath my verbal kit. That bad work comes along, not a journeyman, but a hidden marker, on the way to good work … Continue reading
Stunt Writing
“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to … Continue reading
On Teleology, Evolution, Suit-Wearing and History as Novelism
I was having this conversation yesterday with my girlfriend about how in talk of evolution there is room to disagree with so-called evolutionists because some evolutionist don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. There is room to disagree because many evolutionists don’t talk about evolution as premised in a way we think about the … Continue reading
One More Thing…
“Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.” —H.L. Mencken In the dialogue I’ve been pushing, sometimes gently nudging forth, like the prow of a boat being ushered out into the waves, or sometimes like thrusting the tip of a spear, I have attempted to show arts function, when it operates properly as a knowledge tool, is a force … Continue reading
On Sincerity: Auden
I’ve been reading a lot of W.H. Auden recently. And what struck me, in reading him, is that sincerity without a target on which to pile on for broadly welfarist reasons, which when marked and painted is your run-of-the-mill authenticity, sounds a lot like white middle-class privilege. Continue reading
Culture’s Last Gleaming: The White Hipster
“It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct … Continue reading
On The Weird Fact that Something I Said Got Compared to Duchamp
Here, slightly edited: a conversation I had with my colleague and friend–though, I’ve never met the man–Odin: On the Guardian piece about the collapsing incomes of writers, and Odin’s sincere and challenging critique of people who think they’re writers just because they have a blog. (Opinions are like assholes, right? And everyone of those assholes … Continue reading
On Art Writing, Or: Writing Refuse I
I’m going to post the unedited refuse of things I’ve published elsewhere. This project starts now; it won’t be backdated. Here’s the first of that: that the “prison swap” prisoner of conscience Private Berghdahl’s most difficult test will be to become what he was to all those he loved and who loved hime before … Continue reading
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