In his writings on cultural objects, Adorno self-consciously employed a prismatic and monadological method. The idea was to approach each cultural object as a monad, as a self-contained entity that, if viewed properly, could prismatically illuminate the character of the social totality. This essay seeks to apply a similar method to a work by Donald Judd: Untitled (1967).

Ken Collins’s portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, used to promote the recent L.A. Louver show of his works on paper, is peculiar in its emphasis on the distance between the camera and its subject . . .

“El Desdichado” doesn’t quite work through melancholy but gives form and refuge to it.

“…the triptych painfully reminds us that the form today signifies a broken totality that can only be unified, at best, by an act of artistic creation.”

And I wondered if I was awake or asleep, if it was the moon's paleness or Lucifer's, if it was midnight or dawn!

As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics

It seems to have been forgotten, in recent years, that the basic relationship of the artist to the world in modernity is one of estrangement.

Is it possible Jurassic Park’s innovative special effects overshadow its true artistic depth?

“Film is, for me, an art of composition.”

Why is it that so much writing on art today — ostensibly criticism — only skates on the surface of artworks, providing description, identifying a handful subjects and themes, maybe some precedents, and then a conclusion — or rather, an ending. The writing stops.

The main problem that the artist encounters at work — the source of all their woes and triumphs — is that materials must be transformed: made to give what they cannot. Appearance is the mask of the true face beneath.

The most recent idea that appeared to me, so insistently that I felt compelled to write it down, was of painting as a scaffold. This was related to an older idea of mine, of painting as a veil . . .

“I wanted to connect to people who were like-minded but also saw this as a new frontier with a lot of possibilities for art making.”

Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain discuss musical composition and their albums Drunk Walks and What Goes Away.

C. Philip Mills reviews Skinamarink

Genese Grill reviews Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889–1914.

Caesura editors Patrick Zapien and Gabriel Almeida talk to Elisa Jensen about her practice.

Caesura editors Patrick Zapien and Gabriel Almeida talk to Jeane Cohen about her practice.

Patrick James Dunagan reviews Ted Berrigan’s Collected Prose.

On December 11, 2022, Caesura editors Gabriel Almeida and Patrick Zapien hosted a live-streamed conversation with Bloomington, Indiana-based painter Peter Shear.