Today in my class I, Tiresias: Ovid’s Mythical Women and Contemporary Feminist Art, we are reading books 5 and 6 of the Roman poet’s epic Metamorphoses. Midway through book 5, we encounter the song of the Muses (which includes, among others, the tale of Proserpina/Persephone’s abduction by Pluto/Hades) which is part of a contest with […]
Yesterday I received the news that Minus Plato was not selected to go forward to the panel stage of the Art Writers Grant Program under the blog category. While I am disappointed, I also want use the moment of hearing this news amid this year of daily posting (“Minus Plato Today”) to embrace a role […]
Perhaps, curious reader, you may be eager to know what was then said and done? Click on the images below to hear and see for yourself. – Apuleius Metamorphoses (adapted) Originally – an appropriate beginning, since the Greek word arche, from which the notion is derived means “beginning” – an archive is a place of […]
Virtue? A fig! ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus – Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello My son Eneko is turning 8 on Tuesday and we’re having his birthday party today. As we set up the giant piñata in the shape of the number 8 and hope for the sun to shine on our […]
Last night I attended the talk at the Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) by philosophy and art-writer Boris Groys. He spoke about his recent project, an exhibition in Berlin called Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, and he grounded the thought and art of this obscure Russian avant-garde movement in a reexamination of Kazmir Malevich’s […]
After our introductory meeting last week, this morning my OSU colleague and friend, artist Dani Restack (Leventhal) and I will be meeting with a group of current and ex-OSU MFA students and Classics Grad students to talk about myth and motherhood. This informal discussion series, which we have called Myth Mother Invention will explore the […]
When Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno made Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, filmed at a La Liga match on April 23, 2005, they were not to know what would happen in the 2006 World Cup final. In Gordon and Parreno’s film, the pre-headbutt Zidane was like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad – the focal point, the […]
I have spent today dipping into Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion and I have been startled by the way in which an attention to dance and movement transforms all that I thought I knew about this giant of art history, specifically in how it unites Warburg’s well-known revitalization of Greco-Roman antiquity […]
In a letter to Atticus (Att. 4. 8. 2), Cicero expresses his delight at the installation of some new bookshelves in an oddly convoluted and high-flown fashion: postea uero, quam Tyrannio mihi libros disposuit, mens addita uidetur meis aedibus. qua quidem in re mirifica opera Dionysi et Menophili tui fuit. nihil uenustius quam illa tua […]
There is an anecdote about the tragic poet Phrynichus, wherein the playwright was made a general by the Athenians based on the choreography of a dance routine in one of his plays. Here is the story as preserved in Aelian’s Various Histories (3.8): The Athenians made Phrynichus general, not out of favor, nor for nobleness […]