These are landscapes without landscape — pure ideas of how a picture is painted, of how a landscape is formed as an image.

Stefan Hain and Boyd Rice discuss Rice and Darja Bajagić’s “Banned Exhibition,” punks in the 1970s, and ‘authoritarian’ symbols.

Devlin’s cover-art, in conjunction with the title and text, suggests to me the situation of the astrologer on earth, whose observations describe the dome of the heavens.

In these new pictures by Julian Schnabel, we see the present state of painting: abandoned like unfortunate refuse, making do with what it has, left to its own devices, to elaborate what still remains within it.

If objects — like that dead paintbrush — mean nothing but their functional definition, a human being might well be nothing more than a machine for destroying nature; love, a purely mechanical function.

Though Bajagić’s work may not escape certain tropes of avant-gardist art, it manages to capture pockets of discomfort, images charged with ambivalent energy.

Conpo replicates the cultural effluvia it poaches with little trace whatsoever, really, of any purposeful détournement.

Art about or responding to the COVID pandemic may simply be destined to be bad, but some things truly stand out. Caesura chimes in on the worst.

Mailer’s essay burns as a piece of literary criticism that clarifies the philosophical, aesthetic, and political motives of modern authors like Miller, who have gone the way of the dinosaur.

The hellmouth no longer speaks but softly sings a nonsense verse as we suckle at its infernal teat in forgetful slumber.

The social role of poetry has always been a question, but it has not always been posed explicitly as a question.

We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. Even in times of “peace” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs are a de-composition, so to speak, a gnawing of the source material that their author had encountered both in literature and in society.

Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are.

David Lynch has an impeccable ability to generate an attuned viewer. His Weather Reports show that he can do so in less than a minute. Even more than that, they illustrate the extent to which Lynch is a devout practitioner of art.

I died for Beauty — but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining Room

“Timelessness” must be unmasked as an exponent of the bourgeois concept of truth.

Conceptualist art is making a last desperate attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of taste by plumbing remoter and remoter depths of subart — as though taste might not be able to follow that far down. And also as though boredom did not constitute an aesthetic judgment.

If West’s works are ever “soothing,” it’s precisely because they do often succeed in revealing something true about the world, something we can relate to as listeners. If critics feel that “Wash Us in the Blood” fails to hit the mark, then, it must be for a different reason.

Criticism tries to serve as a theoretical gunsight: what to aim at. And the gun is more like a catapult. It will have to clear the trees here on earth before it leaves the atmosphere.