I am writing this from Madrid, in our tiny flat in Calle Olivar, our new home for the next year. As you would expect, I have spent the first week here exploring the wonders of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. In my three visits so far, two were centered on Picasso’s Guernica. […]
Marcus Aurelius says ‘Don’t wait for Plato’s Republic, buy Paul Chan’s New New Testament today!’ Why not risk, trial and error, and research by buying your own copy of Paul Chan’s New New Testament? If you think social engagement is founded on a community of shared risk, then everyone should own Paul Chan’s New New […]
Today is the last day of the wonderful exhibition Fragments of an Unknowable Whole at the OSU Urban Arts Space, curated by Tim Smith. This group show is not only a dizzying dose of eye-protein but it is also brain-tingling in its ambition, ostensibly exploring how artists actively engage in an ongoing questioning of the […]
On being generously invited by Ann McCoy to contribute a brief essay to the June issue of The Brooklyn Rail that she edited on the topic of the unconscious in contemporary art, I chose to write about how the Epicurean conception of the unconscious, via the work of the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius, can […]
“King Sisyphus, it turns out, had little on the folks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a giant rock up a hill for eternity. In modern-day LA, the city’s largest museum has spent months – and $5 million to $10 million – […]
Eleanor Antin Constructing Helen, 2007 (from Helen’s Odyssey) In looking for exhibitions to visit during my upcoming trip to Los Angeles, I will just miss Eleanor Antin: Passengers at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art by one day. I am especially disappointed that I will not get a chance to see her amazing photograph Constructing Helen (above) […]
Francis Bacon Study for the Human Body from a Drawing by Ingres 1982-84, 1984 “Zeno of Citium was shipwrecked near Athens and stumbled across a copy of Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates in a bookshop. He was so impressed that he asked the bookseller where he could meet a man like that and, by chance, Crates […]
Tomorrow I will be giving a talk along with Ahuvia Kahane (Royal Holloway) on the topic of ‘Cy Twombly, Modern Painting and the Reception of the Classics’. It will be part of the interdisciplinary research network hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies called TRIVIUM: Classical Intersections. Sadly I cannot be in London in person […]
haimulos is a Greek word used by Plato in the Phaedrus to describe the cunning lover who seduces people by claiming that he is not a lover. versutus is a Latin word used by Marsilio Ficino in his translation of Plato’s Phaedrus to describe the cunning lover who seduces people by claiming that he is […]