Unpacking the Cultural Readymade
In a renewal of intention behind existing objects of the past, who is the iconoclast? The one that does not ascribe new meaning because time has passed or the one that does?
Student Work: Criticism
Iz Burns: Creating Connections Through Creativity
"Creativity should be as innate as breathing; it’s all about being new, and expansive, and respectful.”
The Strong Women in the Attic
The Not-So-Secret Punishments of Independent Women in Great Expectations and Middlemarch
An Ugly Nation in Baron Cohen’s Comedic Mirror
In “Who Is America?” Baron Cohen’s goal is no longer to illuminate the fact that people have racist, xenophobic thoughts, but to see just how far those views will go and the horrible things they will guide them to do.
Taylor Swift and the Too-Big Teenaged Girl
Taylor Swift made being an adolescent girl a romantic, beautiful existence, something to be cherished, not run away from.
Variations on the Pleasures of the Temporal Perhaps
Time has a way of vanishing much as desire has a way of changing: almost never in the way expected.
As You Like It and the “Magic Circle”
Fundamentally, Shakespeare's "As You Like It" is an introduction to the concept of the consumer theater, of this new game space that we consciously create via works of “media."
Starring Balthus as the Cheshire Cat
Balthus’s inclusion of cats in his paintings of young girls elevates the aesthetic quality of his portraiture by forcing observers to confront the nature of their gaze.
Poets and Composers
There are poets and there are composers. In a way, it’s simply about their strategies for producing art and relationship to art making. In another way, it’s an inherent, spiritual quality—housed somewhere between the body and the note.
The Metronome
I do not practice with a metronome because I want to become a better drummer. I practice with a metronome to practice focusing. To practice pretending that the world is objective. To meditate.
In Defense of the Non-Place
I seek the sublime enclosed within banality; I seek a hidden form of secular revelation.
The Broken Column
Frida Kahlo's "La Columna Rota" is an anthem of self-reflection, fearlessness, and honesty for people who do not belong to predetermined classifications.
Imagining Berlin
I want to imagine Berlin. It yearns to be x-rayed. We must examine its broken bones.