Patrick Zapien will present a lecture on Theodor Adorno’s “Draft Introduction” to Aesthetic Theory. The lecture will focus on the dialectic of freedom in art, its historical crisis, and how that crisis appears as the enigmatic essence of art in modernity.

Caesura hosts an online panel on “The Crisis of Art Criticism", featuring Sean Tatol of The Manhattan Art Review, Troy Sherman of Midwest Art Quarterly, and Gareth Thomas Kaye of Chicago Spleen.

Today, there is really no urgency to reflect on Jon McNaughton’s body of work. Adam Lehrer’s recent article in Compact, “The Limits of MAGA Art,'' stakes this out clearly. There is much less danger to endorsing McNaughton in the midst of a failing Biden presidency than there was at the height of anti-Trump hysteria . . . Why address it at all then?

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).

“the best music always comes from somewhere else”

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 . . .

A vision of the grotesque, our morbid fascination with violence, and the aestheticization of war…

“…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.”

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.

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.

“But what they do experience, artists will share. If the means of their art set limits, they will seek to move those limits.”

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.

Genese Grill's introduction to her forthcoming essay collection, Portals (Splice).

Is interactivity really the same freedom that art is supposed to help us access?

“Ah, but what if we — [gestures at the ‘painting’] what if it — were to invite nonsense…embrace nonsense…produce nonsense…even mean nonsense?”

We seek to utilize the force of our creative ability to fashion a world of our own or thereby change that which is given.

…the paintings’ true value resides in mediation as a process of transformation: in their voracity, boldness, and tact in transforming the original film stills.

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.

Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….