Donald Judd: Crisis of the Aesthetic
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).
Richard Diebenkorn: “Works on Paper” at L.A. Louver
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 . . .
Wicked Attraction
A vision of the grotesque, our morbid fascination with violence, and the aestheticization of war…
Simon Dinnerstein and His Wings
“…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.”
Hearing in the Present Tense: On La Monte Young's Orphic Revolution
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
The Lonely Eye
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.
Shana Hoehn
On the occasion of her first solo show with Make Room gallery, “A Tangle of Limbs and Long Hair,” Caesura editor Patrick Zapien conducted a brief interview with artist Shana Hoehn. A selection of work from the show follows.
Edvard Munch: A Defense
“But what they do experience, artists will share. If the means of their art set limits, they will seek to move those limits.”
The Noguchi Museum
Visiting the Noguchi Museum recently, I was struck by the difficulty of sculpture as art: how it's constrained by its physical presence to a degree that other media, like music, painting, and poetry, are not.
Apologia: Why Do We Write?
Genese Grill's introduction to her forthcoming essay collection, Portals (Splice).
Assembly Required at The Pulitzer
Is interactivity really the same freedom that art is supposed to help us access?
Review of Georges Braque: a Methodical Adventure by Pierre Reverdy
We seek to utilize the force of our creative ability to fashion a world of our own or thereby change that which is given.
Michael St. John's "The Passions" at De Boer
…the paintings’ true value resides in mediation as a process of transformation: in their voracity, boldness, and tact in transforming the original film stills.
Caesura Roundtable: The NFT
The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century.
from The Qualmist’s Quair
Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….
“Root-Bound” by JPW3 at Night Gallery
There is a richness in color and fullness of form in these works that drew me into them immediately, and held me there. Within them, colors and shapes seem to crumble and grind together, the complexions plow through each other and themselves.
An Afternoon at MoMA
It’s hard to be the Museum of Modern Art when the modern has become a thing of the past and a rather suspect thing at that.
An Afternoon at the Met
But what of the museums themselves? The artworks, their placement, the hallways, the exhibits, the choreography of passing through?