Maybe one of the most recited mantras of the last few years – at least in my perception – has been “we need to take care of each other.” This has been so, at least since Brexit, the election of the 45th president of the United States, the march of the alt-right with chants like […]
The land is civilized, free, prosperous, law-abiding, moderate and cautious. Its many virtues may be summarized as the “banality of the good.” Asked by the tabloid BILD-Zeitung what feelings Germany awakens inher, Angela Merkel once famously replied, “I think of well-sealed windows! No other country can make such well-sealed and nice windows.” Timothy Garton-Ash, “The […]
In the museum or the university, the story remains the same. On the one hand, an institution’s strong physique is measured in outsized philanthropy and thick endowments, as administrators make public-facing boasts of rich collections and academic excellence. On the other hand, internal messaging is one of dispossession and precarity, from cuts and layoffs to […]
As the nightmare of the UK election unfolded, I headed to Beeler Gallery here in Columbus, Ohio for Instance No. 5 of Jo-ey Tang’s exhibition Follow the Mud – a screening of documenta 14 artist Michel Auder’s 1970 film Cleopatra amid an installation created by Michael Stickrod. I made a special Minus Plato edition for […]
The ancient Greek reader didn’t own his own voice; the act of audible reading dispossessed him of it. “If he lends his voice to these mute signs, the text appropriates it: his voice becomes the voice of the written text,” Svenbro stresses. “He has lent his voice, relinquished it.” Is there a debt to repay […]
You were very lucky to take this photograph of a wall-text without a work. That said, you still visited several empty universities across the city – the Academy, the Lyceum and the Stoa Poikile. And, like this empty university, there was still activity on the site – a children’s party at Plato’s, an art collective’s […]
This morning I have been reading Describe the Distance, a short book by poet Quinn Latimer on the work of British artist Sarah Lucas. Early in the book Latimer introduces the topic of shame and with it the Greek concept of aidos. Why does the word “shame” come to me, settle on the edge of […]
