December 16, 2019
The world is bright. The sun shines, tempting you to idle by a sleepy Moravian town’s only swimming pool. The day’s balmy embrace leaves your skin aglow, as if with its own modest radiance. As you approach the poolside, a tepid breeze half-heartedly churns the dust on the road and stirs the leaves on the trees into a chorus of hushed murmurs.
Read articleRead articleDecember 12, 2019
In the shadow of the colossal French Pyrenees, at the fringes of the historic region of Occitanie, lies the town of Lourdes. There, a major Catholic shrine has attracted scores of millions of pilgrims since visionary apparitions beset a denizen in 1858. Some hundred and sixty years ago, at the nearby Grotto of Massabielle, an illiterate peasant named Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have received a rosary-like series visions of the Immaculate Conception.
Read articleRead articleDecember 12, 2019
This scroll depicting a snow monkey mother and child is not very good (I’m still learning how to paint with ink) and the calligraphy is atrocious, but I hope the message is clear: The Earth does not belong solely to humans.
Read articleRead articleDecember 9, 2019
In the beginning was the Word — the Bible, the Quran . . . then Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the cathedral door. Early fighters for a better world used the printing press to spread their righteous fervor in letters, books, manifestoes . . .
Read articleRead articleDecember 6, 2019
Ray Materson’s works are all little tapestries stitched out of threads from socks. He was in jail for some 15 years and used socks were, apparently, the only fabric he had access to.
Read articleRead articleDecember 6, 2019
n an age of virtually ubiquitous mental illness, with ecological and political collapse just around the corner, Outsider Art deserves a second look. What once appeared most peculiar about the genre—its despairing creators, its blunt interfaces with the political, its pyromaniacal relationship to official culture—now belongs more to the center of modern life than its margin. Originally meant to provide establishment with a static frontier, Outsider Art today seems proof that borders everywhere are on the move, that the periphery is pushing in on the heart of our shared intellectual and artistic life.
Read articleRead articleNovember 25, 2019
On January 2, 1911, German painter Franz Marc took his new friend Wassily Kandinsky to a concert by Arnold Schoenberg. On this fateful evening, the Viennese composer stunned the crowd with a strange new music in which tonality had been completely suspended. The crowd was confused if not dismayed, but Marc and Kandinsky – they were riveted.
Read articleRead articleNovember 22, 2019
Never go to art school. Never go to New York. Never rent a loft. Dump your font folder. Forget symmetry and colour coordination. Stop taking text from editorial that you don’t read and packaging it in eye-catching ways. Walk away from your computer.
Read articleRead articleNovember 21, 2019
With apt gravity, artist-activists Crystelle Vu and Julian Oliver have chosen the solemn timbre of a traditional Chau Gong. Bearing “the stark neo-primitivist image” of the Extinction Symbol — an hourglass (for time, swiftly depleting) within a circle (for the planet) — their automated instrument is called “The Extinction Gong.”
Read articleRead articleNovember 19, 2019
We’ve hit upon a frank new mode of rhetoric amid this mounting ecological crisis. It is no longer acceptable to claim that installing solar panels on our roofs, riding our bikes to work, diligently recycling, or shopping locally are strong enough measures to stop it.
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November 3, 2019
Through trial and error and collaborative refinement, entertaining all and dismissing nothing, we will engender a steady stream of memes and stories, videos and happenings, provocations and pranks that articulate the absurd, indifferent, cold-blooded unsustainability of it all; the perversity of a system that thrives on the death of nature and the scored backs of future generations.
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October 16, 2019
So what’s quality writing? Well, what it’s always been: knowing how to put your head in the dark, knowing how to jump into the void, knowing that literature is fundamentally a dangerous trade. — Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses
Read articleRead articleSeptember 24, 2019
When does life begin? This question might mean different things to, say, a teen-ager, yearning for excitement; or to a middle-aged man, driving a Porsche, groping towards some long-elusive “purpose.” But in the context of the abortion debate, this question takes on a greater weight. When does life begin? When does the union of two cells, one maternal and one paternal, become one human being? How can the inception of human life, the moment of miraculous awakening, be measured?
Read articleRead articleSeptember 18, 2019
While derivatives have existed for millennia, under financialization they move from the periphery to the center of the economic order. Today, the value of outstanding “over the counter” derivatives contracts (private futures, options, and swap agreements not made on recognized exchanges) dwarfs the entire world’s GDP, and the volume of annually traded OTC derivatives (which may change hands multiple times a minute) dwarfs even that figure.
Read articleRead articleSeptember 18, 2019
Dreams of a “White Australia” are not dead. Despite the country’s rescinding of official policies under that name in 1973, refugee boats — chiefly from Asia — have been turned back in nearly every case, and asylum-seekers have been jailed in off-shore camps as decreed under current “mandatory immigration detention” laws. Inhumane conditions in migrant jails have led to endemic despair; in some cases, to self-harm and suicide.
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