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 […]
Ever since I watched it, I have wanted to write about Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film Notre Musique. Set in Sarajevo, it tells the story of two women – Olga and Judith – and debates ideas of violence, ethics, colonialism, the Other and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The main reason that I obsessed over the film was […]
After yesterday’s post on Simone Weil’s Electra, I realized that I had not explained how my essay in progress related to the dynamic between Classics and Contemporary Art. All will be revealed in due course and, in the meantime, each of my posts this week will attempt to lead us there, and today is the […]
After a week away, with no internet, no email and no updates on twittering Twump’s transition team, I am back with my Minus Plato daily postings. They will be shorter and sweeter than usual until the new year as I have an essay to write on Simone Weil’s use of ancient Greek and Roman ideas […]
This will be my last post for a week or so as I am going offline to recharge my batteries, and so putting on hold the experiment of blogging every day since Thanksgiving (President Obama said to mourn until Thanksgiving, but these posts have still been their own modest works of mourning). Until I return […]
The only way I could get my hands on R. H. Quaytman’s early book-work Allegorical Decoys was by the circuitous route of Ohio State Libraries’ Interlibrary Loan system. When it finally arrived this morning, I discovered that I was not able to check the book out of the library and so I had to read […]
