Rather than trying to convey what is seen through a sentence in the original, the translator should replicate the structure of seeing — the syntax — since this structure registers the most elemental sense of the intention behind the original.

Why is it no longer self-evident that museums are valuable to anyone but professional artists, critics, administrators, and scholars? Why are the humanist values embraced by the artists of the Paris Commune now so suspect? Why are we so inclined to protest museums and curators, preening for their attention and permission?

Eternity changes Poe’s oeuvre into itself — goes on discovering its truth content — through “a remarkable number of works that derive from it, that are not so much imitations as they are consequences.”

As Baudelaire would come to recognize, the language of commodities is the language of correspondances — of the “sympathetic resonance” of the equality of the principle of exchange — and that the strange, spontaneous language of commodities is the lyricism of modern poetry.

Anyone can only gain by a good translation because a translation acts upon and retroactively transforms the original.

Today’s culture and its criticism seem like they are dying to keep the past alive. But to what end? If knowing our past isn’t exactly what we’re doing here, then what are we doing?

Nobody is going to remember blackout Tuesday. That wasn’t the point. It wasn’t even really an experience, and we won’t learn anything from it.

In what way does art still point beyond capitalism today? Whether or not contemporary art still has a potential to point beyond the present, is a question we must be willing to ask.

Art need not retreat from our moment to succeed as art, but it must not stoop to the remedial desire to change our moment. It is more than enough for works of art to register the human suffering the pervades our age. To register the suffering and paint nonetheless is a cry for a better world.

The task of the art critic (or any intellectual) is to prove that art still matters, that art still has a right to exist — even when she knows it might not, hence the importance of ambivalence as a critical tool.

We wanted to take contemporary art seriously, but so few artworks took themselves seriously.

With the unforeseen rise of the proletariat upon the empty stage of world-history, with the supreme and final flourishing of free and propertyless labor, the age of social revolution — total cosmic transformation — begins.

We may want opera, but are we capable of loving enough for it?

At Caesura, we are still making sense of who our audience is and who it can be.

Modernist art for Trotsky could not be considered a new culture but rather an expression of the task and demand for transcending bourgeois society and culture.

We have been a society in despair for quite some time. And without meaningful social existence, without the political possibility of imagining a better world, what possibilities are there for art?

In pursuit of some kind of deliverance, the avant-garde had undertaken to record the endless parade of human suffering as it appeared in both the costume of a present ‘now’ and in the torn, worn-out rags of an unresolved past.

The past doesn’t disappear into the present but thunders into oblivion along with it. The present is meant by the past, even if it’s not the future that the past had in mind.

To be ‘cultured’ is also to dam up culture and become constipated.

The girl fulfills an ideal, which presents a potential of connecting/relating myself to that ideal. The painting represents the ideal of naivete I seek to develop in and through art criticism.