Lyra and Pantalaimon

I first read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy as a young teen; it felt like a revelation. The books had a rough-textured animal-breath closeness that I had rarely encountered before...
Read MoreRosalie Morales Kearns: Still a Life

In the 1980s, having a poster of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in my college dorm room made me feel sophisticated and grown-up: I’m living in New York, it announced....
Read MoreDavid Beer: A Love of Fakes

Byung-Chul Han’s writing breezes across the pages of Shanzhai. Laconic in style and concise in argument, this short book briefly outlines and illustrates some deceptively intricate arguments...
Read MoreJeremy Fernando on Pan Huiting

Quite possibly one of the more enigmatic lines from a text that is always already an enigma.
Read MoreEric D. Lehman: Art Below Sea Level

Whoever decided to keep the most art per square mile anywhere in the world below sea level had a singular faith in human civilization...
Read MoreJackson Arn on Delacroix’s Photograph

There was a point somewhere between birth and puberty when I would spend hours drawing pictures of bearded men. What interested me most was the beards themselves...
Read MoreThe Black Monday Protests in Polish Women’s Art

A dozen women sitting on the streets in Warsaw were surrounded by middle-aged male protestors wearing ‘football hooligan’ red-and-white scarves. There were insults, kicking...
Read MoreFrancesco Tenaglia on Alessandro Agudio

The path of Alessandro Agudio’s artistic practice intersects with some of this story: an important moment of institutional recognition for his work was his inclusion in Ennesima...
Read MoreDavid Beer on Georg Simmel

In May 1913, German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote to the poet and essayist Margarete von Bendemann to express his joy at seeing some ‘magnificent Rembrandts’.
Read MorePaul Johnathan: Contorted Bodies

Alessio Bolzoni’s sophomore effort finds him intimate with the human form. The photographer’s new book, Abuse II, The Uncanny, features tense shots...
Read MoreGorgeous Gorey!

How does a deeply read, supremely pyrotechnic wordsmith, pioneer of cyberculture who popularized culture jamming and first articulated the notion of Afrofuturism...
Read MoreHow the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact...
Read MoreColin Raff: Torpid Slivers #25-29

Even the best of us, in our tender years, were at some moments cruel to other children. But did you also instruct those you bullied to transform...
Read MoreDreamlessness by Joseph Spece

In Bacon’s Studies of the Human Body (1970), a panel pays skewed homage to Caravaggio’s Narcissus or a Narcissus by the Caravaggisti.
Read MoreSober Seers

A prevailing notion of the lives of artists holds that hedonism is a meaningful part of production. The slide projector on the subject has no shortage of famous faces: There’s boozy Faulkner, banging out novels and screenplays while pickled...
Read MoreElephants, Horses, and the Proportions of Paradise

What does a perfect elephant look like? This was a question that occupied the Flemish artist Crispijn van de Passe II in the years around 1620. By then, several elephants had visited the European continent...
Read More‘Can we live ethically in a cursed world?’

I brought a friend with me the first time I saw Princess Mononoke in an American movie theater. He had no experience with Miyazaki or with Japanese culture or animation...
Read MoreColin Raff: Torpid Slivers #20-24

There was a nice breeze going, and the footpost-knot was nodding more rapidly than usual, and maybe tonight it appeared more malevolent than it ever had before.
Read MoreUnsentimental Vistas

When the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after nearly a decade away in Paris, she came back to a city transformed...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.
Read MoreI was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,
Read MoreIt’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”
Read MoreFrom the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
Read MoreThat Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.
Read MoreOn the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
Read MoreIn the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.
Read MoreI was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,
Read MoreIt’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”
Read MoreFrom the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
Read MoreThat Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.
Read MoreOn the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
Read MoreIn the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
Read More