Category Archives: Minus Plato Today
Today was my first time in the Wexner Center for the Arts after the end of the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957. It was a strange experience as I’d lived with that exhibition in such an intimate way over the past few months. I taught two classes that inspired and engaged […]
Flicking through artist Ian Cheng’s book Live Simulations, I came across the following description of his 2014 work Metis Suns: Pichaku [sic?] looked into her eyes and instantly understood her every molecule. But it wasn’t any special ability on his part: he was 85% idiot with humans. It was hers. She precisely caricatured her face, her […]
You may have seen images of or heard about Kara Walker’s epic 2014 work A Subtlety that she made for Creative Time in the remnants of the Domino Sugar Factory on Brooklyn. The work is an immense sugar-coated sphinx that responds to the racially charged labor-history of the factory. In conceiving of this work, Walker […]
As Minus Plato continues on its daily posting schedule, I will be comparing how artists take up the task of creating work as or about daily activities and ancient philosophy as a way of life. As Pierre Hadot has discussed throughout his work, ancient philosophers wrote ‘spiritual exercises’ which acted as hypomnemata (memory aids) – […]
Leafing through the recent edition of Mousse magazine, I came across the work of Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans and was struck by his varied use of images and ideas from antiquity. In two installations pieces – Hermès in Exile (low and high versions) and Juno Sospita and Coco (Silver Denarius), Bosmans makes indirect connections between the iconography […]
Happy New Year everyone! Here’s a post about the use of Eros/Cupid in advertising, courtesy of a work by Seth Price, its source and extension: “I had the idea for the Bonne Annee pieces when I saw an actual holiday greeting card from the French Communist Party, probably from the early 1970s, that used Vermeer’s […]
I’ve been thinking about digital culture and Classical mythology recently, specifically in terms of how the slickness of a myth (an endlessly reproduced story that maintains its core as its details change) compares to the glitches of mythmaking (e.g. Cicero’s dream of Scipio as a remake of Plato’s myth of Er). In this vein, I […]
I am taking a break from Simone Weil and Carthage, which gives me a chance to post about a revelation I had in Paris this past October. On visiting the post-retirement exhibition of Maurizio Catellan Not Afraid of Love at the Monnaie de Paris, it slowly dawned on me that the new work of the […]
