I’m pleased to let readers of Dissident Muse Journal know that the first instructional post has gone up at Art Anatomy. This is an example of things to come. If you want to know more or enjoy more about figure drawing, please check it out and subscribe for free if it speaks to you.

Going forward, I plan not to announce new Art Anatomy posts here at DMJ. This is an exception since it has been a while since the introductory post. DMJ will continue as before.

It’s good to be teaching again, even if it’s to a mostly imaginary literary conceit. I’ll grant her this—so far, her attendance has been perfect.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

You may also enjoy Art Anatomy.

From Gestures (2014) by Vilém Flusser, translated by Nancy Ann Roth.

“It is apparent that the disruptive gesture resembles work. Work is a gesture whose motive lies in the decision to make something different from what it is, because it is not as it should be. Both destruction and work decide that something is not as it should be. Unlike work, destruction decides not to make it differently but to get rid of it altogether. It negates not just the way the object is but the object itself. One could then suppose that destruction is more radical than work. That would be an error. It is less radical, for its decision does not get at the roots of the not-supposed-to-be. It has no model of obligation. Work is revolutionary. It replaces that which should not be with something that should be. Destruction is not revolutionary: it says no, but not dialectically. The being expressed in the destructive gesture is less radical in the world than one articulated in gestures of work.”

“The gesture not only reaches from the present into the future but also brings an anticipated future back into the present and returns it to the future: the gesture is constantly monitoring and reformulating its own meaning.”

“The gesture of painting is a form of freedom. The painter does not have freedom, he is in it, for he is in the gesture of painting. Being free is synonymous with actually being there. The observation of painting allows us to see the concrete phenomenon of freedom. Only through subsequent efforts to explain it can its ontological, aesthetic, and political dimensions be distinguished. Freedom is actually indivisible: it is the way we recognize that others are in the world with us.”

“The meaning of the gesture of painting is the painting to be painted. This was not discussed very much in this essay because the intention was to pursue the gesture itself. Of course, the painting to be painted is assumed in the gesture, the painted painting is the stiffened, frozen gesture. If there were a general theory of gestures, a semiological discipline responsible for deciphering gestures, art criticism would not be empirical or ‘intuitive’ and would not try to explain aesthetic phenomena away by assigning causes as it does today. Rather, it would be an exact analysis of gestures that have solidified into paintings. In the absence of any such ‘choreographology,’ the better strategy may be to observe the gesture as it occurs before us and in us: as an instance of freedom. It means to try to look at the world with fresh eyes, without the prejudicial spectacles of objectification and abstraction that come with our tradition. Then the world would ‘appear’ again, illuminated with the splendor of concrete phenomena.”

“The subject is the cause of the photograph and the meaning of painting.”

“This view of ourselves in a situation (this ‘reflexive’ or ‘critical’ vision) is characteristic of our being-in-the-world: we are in the world, and we see it, we ‘know’ about it. But to say it once more: there is nothing ‘objective’ about this. The gesture with which we release ourselves from a particular role and which is just as available to the man with the apparatus [that is, a camera—F.] remains bound to a ‘place’ from which we can assert that we are experiencing the same situation twice. This ‘place’ is the basis for a consensus, for intersubjective recognition. If we encounter the man with the apparatus on this basis, we don’t see the situation ‘better’; rather, we see it intersubjectively, and we see ourselves intersubjectively.”

“[T]o observe a situation is to manipulate it, or to put it another way, observation changes the observed phenomenon. To observe a situation is, to the same extent, to be changed by it. Observation changes the observer. … The objectivity of an image (an idea) can only ever be the result of manipulation (observation) of one situation or another. Each idea is false to the extent that it manipulates what it takes into consideration, and in this sense, it is ‘art,’ which is to say fiction. Nevertheless, there are ideas that are true in another sense, namely, in really grasping what is under consideration. That may be what Nietzsche meant when he said that art is better than truth.”

“It is banal to regard the cinema as the archetypal womb, that windowless cave that means both birth and death, even though the similarities between cinema and Plato’s cave, with the moving shadows on the wall, are so striking that it’s impossible to read Plato’s myth without thinking of films. Banal as the archetypal connection may be, then, the thought that Plato was the first film critic is a provocative one.”

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

Rilke’s copious literary gift is undeniable. But increasingly I found myself anticipating Becker’s raw probity. Page 51:

I think we should not always demand of our poor soul a Sunday afternoon mood. I also find that every action we take is also who we are, and we should respect that. I do not accept any norm—not the Rilke norm, not the Becker norm, etc. I think of the human in his multi-hued variety, or at least I try to do so, with humility and respect.

You can hear the soul of a painter ringing through her words.

I have a large bouquet of white autumn berries on the table in front of me—they are of the kind that say “pop” when you step on them. They glimmer in the yellowish lamplight and I caress them with my eyes.

At one point in the book, Rilke and Becker are in Paris. His wife is in Cairo. Her husband, with whom she has separated, is in Worpswede. Rilke and Becker are exchanging letters trying to arrange a visit but neither can manage it. Becker signs a letter “Paula ?”. I am me, she tells Rilke—Ich bin Ich—and yet sees herself as nothing, or not-something-yet. On page 114 she warns,

…do not expect anything of me. Otherwise I may disappoint you, since it might be a long time yet before I amount to anything. And once I have amounted to something, then perhaps I will not be what you had imagined. I do so want something beautiful, but one has to wait to see whether God Himself, or fate, wants that too. I think the best way is to follow one’s path as in a dream.

Given that she was dead in less than a year, this was a heartbreaking thing to read. The frequency of correspondence dropped off as she disappeared into her work. Did she sense that she didn’t have long?

I too hear the clock ticking. I always have. I too don’t think I’ve done all I can do yet. More passionate lines in the book followed, but follow one’s path as in a dream continued to haunt me.

I now have three large-scale creative projects going. One is the illustration of my anatomy book, which will be chronicled at the Art Anatomy Substack. One is The Socialist Book of the Dead. They have drawn much preliminary interest and I must ramp up production on them immediately to take advantage of it. The third I can’t announce yet but it’s as consuming as the other two.

Consequently, I’m putting the Asynchronous Studio Book Club on hiatus. I’ll continue sharing readings, but in a different format that gives me a more flexible schedule.

“These past weeks I have been working harder than I ever have in my life,” Becker wrote to Heinrich Vogeler in May 1906.1 “I think I’m getting somewhere. And that makes me feel wonderful—this is only a note. Quite soon I’ll write you a long and proper letter.” So it is with me and you, dear reader.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

This was a commission, for which I’m available. Reach out if you need a sea monster of your own. I am also available for dragons and basilisks. Unicorns are on offer for a premium.

I have long thought of the Leviathan as a whale. That’s not correct, as I found in the course of researching this image. The Leviathan eats whales. The lore hails from ancient Judaism, following other Canaanite sources. The sea beast has counterparts on land as Behemoth and in the air as Ziz. Midrash says that God originally made a male and a female Leviathan, but lest they reproduce and crowd the oceans, He slew the female and is reserving her flesh for the victory banquet that he has planned for the party celebrating the arrival of the Messiah. Which means that her enormous length is chilled in some supernal refrigerator. I like to think that angels are preparing gefilte fish as we speak.

In Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 book of that name, he argues that the nature of man is so combative and selfish that the only hope for a harmonious society is a social contract in which we trade liberty for safety, guaranteed by an absolute sovereign. Britannica:

The sovereign determines who owns what, who will hold which public offices, how the economy will be regulated, what acts will be crimes, and what punishments criminals should receive. The sovereign is the supreme commander of the army, supreme interpreter of law, and supreme interpreter of scripture, with authority over any national church. It is unjust—a case of reneging on what one has agreed—for any subject to take issue with these arrangements, for, in the act of creating the state or by receiving its protection, one agrees to leave judgments about the means of collective well-being and security to the sovereign. The sovereign’s laws and decrees and appointments to public office may be unpopular; they may even be wrong. But, unless the sovereign fails so utterly that subjects feel that their condition would be no worse in the free-for-all outside the state, it is better for the subjects to endure the sovereign’s rule.

Leviathan as the serpentine symbol of the sovereign state became a trope of libertarian economic thought when Robert Higgs invoked it in Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987). This is where Higgs observed what he called the ratchet effect, in which government uses crises to increase power, which it rescinds only partially after each crisis passes. This is possibly the truest and most durable observation about politics since Bakunin wrote, “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”

Due to this commission and an upcoming residency, further discussion of the current Asynchronous Studio Book Club book will be delayed, but not by much.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

The current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

I’ve finished reading The Only Revolution by Jiddu Krishnamurti.1 Krishnamurti, as a child, was groomed by the Theosophists to become what they were calling the “World Teacher.” In his twenties, he dissolved the organization that they formed for this purpose and became a syncretic guide to truth, adopting no creed. Instead he advocated for a practice of continuous, unalloyed attention, exemplified as meditation.

The Only Revolution, published 1970, relates anecdotes about visits from students and the curious. Krishnamurti establishes each scene with thoughts about meditation, followed by descriptive second-person-singular passages of his surroundings in India, then California, then Europe.

If you were very quiet, without any thought flashing across the mind, you could just hear the deep bell of some cathedral. It must have been far away, and in the short silences between the cock’s crowing you could hear the waves of this sound coming towards you and going beyond you—you almost rode on them, going far away, disappearing into the immensities. The crowing of the cock and the deep sound of the distant bell had a strange effect. The noises of the town had not yet begun. There was nothing to interrupt the clear sound. You didn’t hear it with your ears, you heard it with your heart, not with thought that knows ‘‘the bell’? and “the cock”, and it was pure sound. It came out of silence and your heart picked it up and went with it from everlasting to everlasting. It was not an organised sound, like music; it was not the sound of silence between two notes; it was not the sound you hear when you have stopped talking. All such sounds are heard by the mind or by the ear. When you hear with your heart, the world is filled with it and your eyes see clearly.

A visitor would appear and ask a question. What is God? What is love? Why are you against gurus? Why are you against drugs? (It was 1970.) There is an exception, late in the book: an artist who shows up to the interaction so full of himself that no question forms. Krishnamurti is left to his reflections. Here’s the passage.

He was an artist, a painter. He said he had a talent for it as another might have a talent for the building of bridges. He had long hair, delicate hands and was enclosed within the dream of his own gifts. He would come out of it—talk, explain—and then go back into his own den. He said his pictures were selling and he had had several one-man exhibitions. He was rather proud of this, and his voice told of it.

There is the army, within its own walls of self-interest; and the business-man enclosed within steel and glass; and the housewife pottering about the house waiting for her husband and her children. There is the museum-keeper, and the orchestra conductor, each living within a fragment of life, each fragment becoming extraordinarily important, unrelated, in contradiction to other fragments, having its own honours, its own social dignity, its own prophets. The religious fragment is unrelated to the factory, and the factory to the artist; the general is unrelated to the soldiers, as the priest is to the layman. Society is made up of these fragments, and the do-gooder and the reformer are trying to patch up the broken pieces. But through these separative, broken, specialised parts, the human being carries on with his anxieties, guilt and apprehensions. In that we are all related, not in our specialised fields.

In the common greed, hate and aggression, human beings are related and this violence builds the culture, the society, in which we live. It is the mind and the heart that divide—God and hate, love and violence—and in this duality the whole culture of man expands and contracts.

The unity of man does not lie in any of the structures which the human mind has invented. Co-operation is not the nature of the intellect. Between love and hate there can be no unity, and yet it is what the mind is trying to find and establish. Unity lies totally outside this field, and thought cannot reach it.

Thought has constructed this culture of aggression, competition and war, and yet this very thought is groping after order and peace. But thought will never find order and peace, do what it will. Thought must be silent for love to be.

That was a shame for the painter, for Krishnamurti had much to say about beauty in this book.

Through the wood you could see crocuses, daffodils and bright yellow forsythia. You looked at it all from a distance and it was a patch of yellow against a green lawn. As you came close to it you were blinded by the brightness of that yellow—which was God. It was not that you identified yourself with the colour, or that you became the expanse that filled the universe with yellow—but that there was no you to look at it. Only it existed, and nothing else—not the voices around you, not the blackbird singing its melody of the morning, not the voices of the passers-by, not the noisy car that scraped by you on the road. It existed, nothing else. And beauty and love were in that existence.

Light is an extraordinary thing; the more you watch it the deeper and vaster it becomes; and in its movement the trees were caught. It was startling; no canvas could have caught the beauty of that light. It was more than the light of the setting sun; it was more than your eyes saw. It was as though love was on the land. You saw again that yellow patch of forsythia, and the earth rejoiced.

Constantly to seek the purpose of life is one of the odd escapes of man. If he finds what he seeks it will not be worth that pebble on the path. To live in the present the mind must not be divided by the remembrance of yesterday or the bright hope of tomorrow : it must have no tomorrow and no yesterday. This is not a poetic statement but an actual fact. Poesy and imagination have no place in the active present. Not that you deny beauty, but love is that beauty in the present which is not to be found in the seeking.

The blue jays were calling and the squirrels were very active that morning. The beauty of the tree in its solitude gripped your heart. It wasn’t the beauty of what you saw; its beauty lay in itself. Though your eyes had seen more lovely things, it was not the accustomed eye that saw this tree, alone, immense and full of wonder. It must have been very old but you never thought of it as being old. As you went and sat in its shadow, your back against the trunk, you felt the earth, the power in that tree, and its great aloofness. You could almost talk to it and it told you many things. But there was always that sense of its being far away although you touched it and felt its harsh bark which had many ants going up it. This morning its shadow was very sharp and clear and seemed to stretch beyond the hills to other hills. It was really a place of meditation if you know how to meditate. It was very quiet, and your mind, if it was sharp, clear, also became quiet, uninfluenced by the surroundings, a part of that brilliant morning, with the dew still on the grass and on the reeds. There would always be that beauty there, in the meadow with that tree.

Krishnamurti evidently thought often, and deeply. But he observed, “Seeing is not this process of thought; seeing is always new, and fresh, and active.” Because he could step off the road of thought and onto the path of seeing, beauty unfolded for him, more than for the painter, despite his one-man exhibitions. Let us find out what kind of seers we are.

Yesterday I lashed bamboo with coarse twine to make tripods. From each lashing dropped an excess of cord to the ground, to invite a tomato plant to ascend. The sky shone blue, but a fresh wind announced imminent rain.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

The current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

A self-described “family” of artists at the Worpswede artist colony at the turn of the 20th century that included Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Becker “enjoyed nude bathing, moonlit dancing, and weekly concerts and poetry readings in the music room at Vogeler’s Jugendstil-inspired villa, Barkenhoff, which was set in manicured gardens.” This is according to the introduction by Jill Lloyd of The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence edited by German art historian Rainer Stamm.

One gets the sense that they enjoyed a touch more than that, but we can only speculate. What’s sure is that Becker and the painter Clara Westhoff became confidantes, and Rilke established an intimate correspondence with Becker that was sufficiently charged to inspire lines like this:

I know you are listening: there is a voice,
on Sunday evening in the white salon.
The stillness that surrounds my head,
wilts and turns pale. I would like to
hear you train your ears once more on vocal prayers.-
Beethoven spoke... my senses tremble still,
And all that's dark in me reverberates.

She answered:

We are waiting for you during the hour of dusk, my small room and myself, and there are autumn mignonettes on the red table, and the clock also has stopped ticking. But you do not come. And then we are grateful again and happy that you exist at all. This knowledge is beautiful.

Unbeknownst for a long time to Becker, Rilke was conducting a similar correspondence with Westhoff. He was either infatuated with both, or he talked that way to all the girls. The first drop in the roller-coaster friendship between Rilke and Becker came with the announcement of his plans to marry Westhoff. Becker married Otto Modersohn, another painter at Worpswede, and felt conflicted about the union for its whole duration.

In a discussion that went on entirely too long in my review of Modersohn-Becker’s 2024 exhibition at the Neue, I remarked, with respect to Florine Stettheimer,

The fact of the matter is that in 1906, Stettheimer was still trying to arrive at a style and paint something of note. She was developing a jaded outlook, informed by her sour temperament and nascent European feminism. Modersohn-Becker, who was five years younger, was already producing original work and had embraced the Lebensreform movement with such gusto that we have sketches by her husband Otto, dated to 1905, of her doing calisthenics in the nude. Modersohn-Becker was the modern woman that Stettheimer’s biographer wishes Stettheimer had been.

Stettheimer was a charming and enjoyable modernist, but she does not compete against Modersohn-Becker’s gravity. The comparison arose because I reviewed a biography of Stettheimer a couple of years earlier.

At the break in the reading, things have just gotten started between them. Rilke gave Becker a “sketchbook,” really a notebook of poems, for safekeeping, then left Worpswede to set up a writer’s studio in Smargendorf. Though nothing came of it beyond friendship, that should be recorded as one of the greatest seduction openings of all time.

Becker asked him to visit a friend, Maidly, in Berlin.

Maidly’s older sister was buried alive under a huge sand pit near Dresden at the age of eleven, along with six other children playing there, myself included. We were able to save ourselves. This child was the first experience of my life. Her name was Cora and she had grown up in Java. We first met when we were nine and loved each other very much. She was very mature and intelligent. With her, the first glint of consciousness entered my life. When in the hour of her death Maid and I stuck our heads deep into the sand so as not to see the horror that we suspected, I said to her: “You are my destiny.” And she has remained that. And because she is my destiny, I ask you the favour of bringing a bit of beauty to her.

There’s no guarantee that the writings of a good artist are of interest. But they are in this case, pointedly.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

The current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

The title is a line of Rilke’s set down in a poem written to Paula Modersohn-Becker, recorded in The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence edited by Rainer Stamm for Eris. We will read it over three weeks beginning Sunday.

Finally, we’ll return to Jed Perl’s Art in America anthology for a couple of weeks. I’ve been avoiding it, I don’t know why. I think it was slogging through the Jack Kerouac chapter, but one can’t hold that against the rest of the book. After that, as scheduled, we’ll come to our Summer Fiction Read, Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino. As promised, this is not going to be a beatdown like previous Summer Fiction Reads. It looks delightful.

Scheduled after that, interspersed with two-week blocks of Art in America: Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, edited by Robert C. Morgan, On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981 by Gilles Deleuze, which comes recommended by a DMJ reader, Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester, and Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art by Jacques Rancière.

New to the pile: Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages by Umberto Eco, Gestures by Vilém Flusser, and Saving Beauty by Byung-Chul Han.

This is all recorded with past readings at the Asynchronous Studio Book Club home page. I look forward to your participation.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

The next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

Artforum recently posted an essay by Harmon Siegel, “When Criticism Was Life and Death,” subtitled “On ‘Problems of Criticism’ and judgment in times of crisis.” It situates an essay by Clement Greenberg of which I’ve long been fond, “Complaints of an Art Critic,” in history I didn’t know: it was part of a series prompted by Robert Goldwater about the state of criticism circa 1967. Artforum conveniently collects the ensuing discussion in ten parts over the following four years here. Siegel’s essay opens thus:

Today, one rarely encounters the kind of stridency that [Barbara] Rose deplored in critics like Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried, then leading voices in Artforum, not to mention the fury of Rose’s response. Not because criticism has become neutral, but because we displace its controversial debates onto questions of intention and impact. We ask about critics’ beliefs (do they have good politics?), their effects on audiences (do they make their readers better?), and their institutional positions (are they complicit with bad actors?). These arguments remain lively, even vicious. But we no longer argue about whether art as such is a matter of life and death—we assume that it’s not. Consequently, critics aren’t prompted to ask about the political valence of their own activity: Is criticism itself a moral good?

To my mind, the question is made incoherent by conflating the political with the moral. It is also the wrong question. The correct one is: Are these writers doing art criticism?

Three years have passed since I wrote “The Postcritical Era,” in which I observed,

Criticism will continue to be written in the postcritical era just as art continues to be made after Danto’s end of art. But one, following art’s example with respect to the philosophical turn, henceforth it will be written in light of its exogenous marginalization by big art world money and its endogenous marginalization by postliberal progressive politics. Two, the system is closed and the energy is running out. Criticism’s chief concern will be the policing of opinion, from which not even the Seph Rodneys of the world will be excused. The consolidation of three major American art glossies under one corporate entity indicates serious, maybe fatal dissipation of the critical project. To be candid, there are hardly any critics under the age of forty who are worth reading.

Now, as noted recently in one of those glossies, Art in America, there are hardly any critics under the age of seventy who are employed full-time. That said, the author noting as much, Catherine G. Wagley, exemplifies the tendency recognized by Siegel to subject critics to political tests. Having complained at article-length about the inability of Roberta Smith, Christopher Knight, and Peter Schjeldahl to sustain post-2020 progressive values for the entirety of decades-long careers that mostly ran prior to then, she concludes:

I already miss Knight at the Times and what he represented. The field needs what he brought, and it needs what journalistic criticism promises at its best—that consistent, careful looking and analysis—but this kind of criticism has never come close to meeting its potential in the US. We have to stop wallowing in the wreckage of models that never worked. There’s still value in talking about the reasons for their failure; transparency around money and institutional disinvestment is important to building a less-hierarchical, hopefully more sustainable version of the field, which will be slow, painful work. For me, so far, doing this means writing for and investing my time in small independent publications that share my values—an imperfect solution, but at least it keeps me focused on what’s possible.

I agree that the models are wrecked, but did they never work? Certainly, they never supported what might have been possible, in theory, for art criticism repurposed as opinion policing to impugn rich people, white people, or men for their supposed inability to perceive the world correctly. But let’s entertain the possibility that that is not art criticism’s real purpose.

The main protagonist of Siegel’s narrative is Barbara Rose. By installment #4 in the ten-part series, she had run out of patience for art criticism as such.

It was 1968, and Barbara Rose was excoriating her Artforum colleagues in the pages of the magazine. Assassinations, riots, and wars were ripping the country apart. Yet somehow these writers were wasting their energy and talents debating how sculpture could acknowledge its dependence on the floor. Their zeal would have been appropriate “to a discussion of black power, urban renewal or war resistance.” But in a “morally and politically neutral activity like art criticism,” it was worse than absurd. It was repugnant.

Others chimed in with similar concerns. They were attacked from the left. Leon Golub wrote a letter to the magazine responding to Rose.

Almost by definition, he wrote, art that needed criticism was too recalcitrant to inspire real action. In times of actual emergency, artworks without evident political content were just monuments to patrician aloofness; abstract sculptures stood as “grimacing monsters.”¹¹ Whereas, in her first two installments, Rose had positioned herself against the ex-Trotskyites and their apolitical progeny, she now found herself fighting on a second front, defending criticism from the charge that it was intrinsically reactionary.

This raises the possibility that the purity spiral we’re now seeing in art criticism started spinning in the late 1960s, as various factions of progressivism squabbled—eruditely, granted, but it was still squabbling—about how much revulsion should be summoned concerning the news cycle in a given work of art or art review. Those who thought that the answer was “a lot, most of the time,” prevailed over the course of six decades, against other progressive writers who clung to vestiges of universalism and transcendence. The prize for their victory is an imminent future with zero full-time art critics.

Crisis is a reflexively recurring trope in art criticism of recent decades, either regarding current events or the state of criticism itself. Wagley:

In his final column as the Times’ critic, Knight acknowledged that “every few years now there seems to be a flurry of worry about a ‘crisis in criticism.’” He went on, “I think that fuss misses the mark, however. The crisis is in publishing, not criticism.” I suspect that this misdirection—targeting criticism, rather than the industry, with its billionaire owners, that systemically devalues the craft, furthering its irrelevance by refusing to diversify its hires—reflects our feeling of helplessness.

This, after decades of her fellow travellers salting the scorched epistemic ground upon which criticism takes place. The goose of art criticism is so cooked that you could break off its head and make a charcoal drawing with it, and she thinks that the bird might revert to its former juiciness if billionaires weren’t sacrificing the relevance of criticism by refusing to hire people who tick progressive diversity checkboxes.

Which brings me to Alma Allen. The United States used to select its Venice Biennale artists through the National Endowment for the Arts. The Trump administration moved that job to the State Department, stripped the application language about diversity, told proposals to “promote American values,” and handed the commission to a new nonprofit called the American Arts Conservancy, led by a Trump appointee who founded a natural pet food store in Tampa.

Consequently, the commission is politically radioactive. The organizers approached two other artists first, Barbara Chase-Riboud and William Eggleston. Both declined. Eventually the commission found Alma Allen, a self-taught American sculptor who lives in Mexico and makes biomorphic abstractions in bronze, wood, and stone. Both of his galleries, Mendes Wood and Olney Gleason, asked him not to accept the invitation and dropped him when he did.

The reviews of his Biennale installation have been brutal. Hyperallergic said, “Alma Allen’s United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale says nothing, does nothing, means nothing, and goes nowhere.” Frieze likened his work to “decor for a pricey fragrance store in Palm Springs.”

The critics panned Allen for making work with no political message in a moment that supposedly demands one. But the artist who would have delivered that message, Chase-Riboud, was offered the opportunity first and turned it down, on political grounds. So the vacuum the critics are blaming on Allen was generated upstream, by the politics those critics share. Besides, had Chase-Riboud accepted, she would likely have been attacked from the left for laundering the reputation of an administration deemed hostile to the values expressed in her work. In any case, critics are lambasting Allen’s sculptures based on what they aren’t instead of what they are, which is a fundamental critical failure.

But let’s look at the scoreboard. Allen is going down in history as a Biennale artist, and he is now represented by Perrotin. He lives with his gorgeous family (he’s partnered with author and curator Su Wu) in sunny Mexico. He’s working large-scale in a rural studio in Tepoztlán. Meanwhile, ARTnews printed this remark on Allen’s work by senior editor Maximilíano Durón.

The art on view isn’t the worst art I’ve ever seen. But this, after all, is the Venice Biennale, where the very best is supposed to be on view. The bar shouldn’t be in hell, even if the country is. I’ve often heard, in the most neoliberal of circles, the refrain, when protesters advocating for change are criticized: What do they want? No museum at all? In this case, it would be an empty pavilion. I think that would be preferable to an artist who is comfortable enough to say his art is apolitical while cozying up to a right-wing authoritarian government that seeks to bend the world to its will.

The link goes to an Art in America piece describing Allen’s work as “bland blobs.” It doesn’t explain how he was “cozying up to a right-wing authoritarian government that seeks to bend the world to its will” except by accepting an honor from a committee that’s as connected to Donald Trump as the Sugarhill Gang is connected to the Apache. And how is the Art in America/Art Forum/ARTnews blob at Penske Media doing? One of its bulbous appendages just published an essay about the accelerating extinction of the profession on which its existence depends.

Consistent throughout Allen’s story is how he has committed to the autonomy of his art. Many publications have noted his reluctance to discuss his work. The Durón review relates that Allen’s Biennale statement includes an interview with Wu in which she asks him, regarding one of the objects, “What is it?” He answers, “It is as stubborn as I am, I cannot tell you.” Durón regards this as an abdication: “To be apolitical or neutral, especially at an event organized by national pavilions and in which countries can officially participate only if they are recognized by Italy, is a political statement after all—even if you don’t want it to be.”

But the abdication is Durón’s, of the responsibility and the humility to accept Allen’s art on its nonverbal and nonpolitical terms. It’s of a piece with his belief that the United States is in hell. It is not; this is just how a certain extremity of progressive experiences life when his team is not in power. It too is arrogance and refusal to attend to evident reality. There’s a possibility that a profound experience might unfold in the silence enabling Allen’s work. It may not; I haven’t seen the work in person. But Durón ensured that he wouldn’t detect it by nattering into the absence about his political anxieties.

Allen is not the future of art because of his style, but because his work connects to the autonomous realm characterized by Jed Perl as the confluence of authority and freedom. As related in a more sensitive treatment by Jo Lawson-Tancred,

Allen’s insistence that he is “not a propagandist” could be seen as evasive, given the broader political context of the exhibition. But, as he lights up with excitement talking about his passion for the “quasi-religious,” spiritual dimensions of physics, or his sense that “the entire structure of our universe is one consciousness,” the open-ended, resolutely undidactic nature of his practice begins to make more sense.

The realm to which Allen’s words are pointing is the source of art’s vitality. Pace Siegel, the urgent question about art criticism is not its political valence, but its artistic valence. If it can connect to the autonomous realm, it may yet survive. If it can’t, its passing is no loss.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Next titles in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club will appear shortly at the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

An astute articulation of contemporary Zionism appeared last fall in Tablet. “June Israel vs. October Israel” by Jordan Chandler Hirsch, who among other things is senior counsel at Palantir, contrasted two triumphs with two disasters. The first pairing was the June 1981 strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq with the October 2000 lynching of two IDF soldiers in Ramallah that gave rise to the “red right hand” symbol worn by anti-Israel celebrities. The second was the 12-Day War in Iran in June of last year with the October 7 attacks. Hirsch extends these events into a metaphor about two modes of Israeli existence, of the title. “They constitute competing currents in Israel’s strategic personality, which revolve around each other, helix-like, across the decades. The distinction isn’t merely between success and failure, but between fundamentally different approaches to Israel’s orientation in the world.”

The differences between them in summary:

June Israel is proactive, daring, devastatingly competent; October Israel is complacent, risk-averse, subject to surprise. June Israel is clear-eyed, aware that it cannot read its enemies’ intentions and must instead only count their missiles. October Israel, by contrast, is hubristic. Mistaking technological superiority for strategy, it assumes its dominance is recognized and that it can, Machiavelli-like, manage its enemies short of war. This confidence produces paralysis: Why act boldly when you believe you can manage existing threats?

Hirsch touches on what this means for American advocates for Israel. “For American Jews, June Israel presents an uncomfortable new reality. The institutional architecture of Diaspora advocacy—the lobbying organizations, the campus chapters, the congressional relationships—was built for October Israel, the tiny state whose survival depended upon burrowing in the American bosom.” And October Israel is in the process of being shed. Since his point is about the relationship between the United States and Israel, he rests there. But the metaphor extends to Jews more broadly.

October Jews are trying to go on with the assimilated existence that they have enjoyed in America for several decades. The crux of that effort is to continue pretending to be white people in a progressive racial narrative about white culpability for all human woes. They denounce Israel and blame its military achievements for worsening antisemitism. They refuse to stand up for Jews without socially required throat-clearing about the plight of the Palestinians, or even with it. They believe, against piles of evidence, that we can educate and placate our way back into the majority’s good graces.

June Jews have accepted being racial Jews, exploding the absurd categories of race in America and openly inviting the disgust of both progressives enmeshed in anti-whiteness and conservatives enmeshed in white pride. They recognize Israel as a place where nine million people live in modernity and ought to be allowed to continue to do so, in defiance of an enormous multiple of that population who long to hasten the return of the Twelfth Imam. June Jews don’t think that Israel is perfect; they just don’t want to hear about it from nitwits who make excuses for Iran and its barbaric proxy militias. They reject the genocide libel. They reject submission. They reject lies. And they are buying guns.

You can probably guess which camp I’ve joined. The above image is a shooting target I designed for an event this weekend in Croydon, New Hamsphire, that we’re calling The Oyfshtand, which is Yiddish for “uprising.” I also made this poster.

You don’t have to be Jewish to join us. You just have to want to shoot (paper targets with pictures of) Nazis. If you’re unfamiliar with pistols, you can come for a free lesson from one of the best firearms instructors I’ve ever met. Just bring hardware-store ear and eye protection (glasses are fine if you wear them) and a cap with a brim. We’ll have a nosh, and then we’ll have an open range accommodating both pistols and rifles. I’ll be out with my .38 Special revolver, my .380 semi-auto, and my AR-15. I’ll let you try any of them.

It would be a tragedy to have to shoot someone, even a Nazi, even defensively. But June Judaism, adapting Hirsch, is clear-eyed. And what’s clear is that we should no more accept the ridiculous conditions that our enemies are placing on our personhood than Israel should accept the ridiculous conditions that its enemies are placing on its nationhood.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Next titles in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club will appear shortly at the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

I got deeply into both figure drawing and modernist abstraction in graduate school, and have been working out the tensions ever since. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I wrote an anatomy book. I never illustrated it, though.

I’m doing so now. To accompany that effort, I’ve started another Substack in which I’ll record the process, while offering additional commentary on the art of drawing as the muse directs me. It will be written in the form of letters to an art student who is mostly a composite literary conceit, but with some basis in reality. Please have a look at Art Anatomy and subscribe if you’re so moved.

Posting at Dissident Muse Journal will continue as previously. It just made sense to split off the art anatomy content, because there’s going to be a lot of it, and I need not subject those interested in the topic to the rest of my ponderings.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Next titles in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club will appear shortly at the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

Christopher McDonald of The McFiles (pronounced “mac files”) had me on his livestream yesterday evening to talk about The Socialist Book of the Dead. We had an immensely enjoyable conversation about the project, why socialism remains attractive despite its history of unmitigated disaster, and what God has to do with all this. You can check out the recording here.

There seems to be a lot of interest in the story of an artist working on a project critical of socialism from a man-bites-dog angle. Future appearances are in the works, and I’ll endeavor to let you know in advance so you can catch them.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Next titles in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club will appear shortly at the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

wrote a brave post recently about how she failed at ink drawing on a commission.

Holly’s Substack

On Keeping Your Hands Clean

What follows is a 1,000-word essay on the value of being a beginner, written by a person who, when faced with actually being a beginner this week, behaved like a toddler being told it was bedtime…

Read more

2 months ago · 89 likes · Holly MathNerd

The subject was a hummingbird.

I can see, without straining, what is wrong with the hummingbird. There is essentially one value across the whole bird — no light source, no shadow, no modeling. The chest is a flat blue scribble where, in colored pencil, I would be layering six or seven hues for iridescence. The branch is a stick. The white acrylic-pen highlights are doing far too much load-bearing work; in colored pencil, value gradations would handle most of that, and the white would be a final accent rather than the only reason you can tell there’s dimension here at all.

Bad news first—failing is terrible, failing in public is extra-terrible, failing on a commission is two cups of sour milk on a bowl of Cringe Flakes. The good news is that the above analysis of what was wrong with the drawing is flawless. It describes the problems exactly.

MFA programs usually have you teaching a basic course on drawing or design. At a generalist liberal arts institution like the one where I obtained my MFA, students typically ended up in Drawing 101 because they couldn’t sing and were too shy to act. I observed that the room divided itself into three groups after a couple of weeks. There was one kid, maybe two, who could draw really well. Everyone knew who they were. Most of the rest of the room were kids who could not draw so well. When you pointed out problems in their drawings to fix, they would do it, but not with any great enthusiasm. The remainder, maybe another one or two kids, couldn’t draw any better than the second group. But when they realized they had gotten something wrong, they would gnash their teeth and growl. Then they would fix it, all the while suppressing screams at their sheer deficit of talent.

It was the last group that was most likely to produce artists. Holly, I can tell from her post, is in that group.

I was a fifth-decile draftsman at art school. What I had instead was an instinctual commitment to art-making that came from I know not where. I am still making art, and classmates who could draw circles around me have largely stopped. I think that when skills come too easily, they feel like they’re not worth doing. Sometimes skills that don’t come easily are also not worth doing, and that’s another problem. You usually don’t know that until you’ve gone through some effort to acquire them.

Impressed by the astute scrutiny of her own drawing, I emailed Holly to say I could solve several of her problems with pen in a 20-minute video call. She replied that she would, but she was having problems with her hearing aids. This is one of the reasons for her ambitious commission-seeking: to raise money for new devices. With her permission, I’m writing this lesson out in visual form instead, so she can read it, and so I can encourage you to sign up for Holly’s consistently amusing and interesting Substack as a paid subscriber. Do it, please, it’s a mitzvah.

Hatching

When modeling form in pen and ink, you have two options. The first one is hatching, which is developing an optical midtone through sets of short lines drawn closely together. This is Raphael.

The lines shading the model’s left temple and cheek are hatching. The lines shading the side of her nose and her jawbone are cross-hatching, in which hatching lines stack on each other in sets. The curved lines shading the strap of her bodice on the closer shoulder are cross-contour, which is the other option you have for modeling form in pen and ink, but that will have to wait for another lesson.

Lines have to follow some rules to cohere as hatching. First of all, they need to be straight. Not ruler-straight, but if they bend too much, they start grabbing form in a cross-contour way that isn’t the modeling effect you want. This is a Krita drawing with the Ink-4 Pen Rough brush selected and colors picked from the Raphael.

Second, sets of hatching lines should be parallel. Again, not protractor-parallel, but enough so they register as a unit. Sets of hatching lines that aren’t parallel tend to look like texture rather than shadow.

Third, the lines should be discontinuous. That is, don’t zigzag. I have seen two artists successfully zigzag: Sargent and Picasso. If you’re zigzagging and getting Sargent- or Picasso-level results, please ignore me and keep zigzagging. If you’re not, just draw discrete lines.

A common mistake in hatching is hooking the lines, which is related to zigzagging. There are, I concede, some hooked lines in the Raphael. I put a tiny hook on the first line in my left-hand example. (I blame the tablet. Okay, I blame the operator of the tablet.) It’s not a great sin. But if you let it get out of control, you may get non-shading effects that look cluttered.

Fourth, the lines should be predictably spaced. Note that I didn’t write evenly, though in practice, “predictably” usually means “evenly.” If you look at the passage of shading from the temple to the cheekbone in the Raphael, you’ll notice the spacing gets a little denser around the eye socket. It also opens up around the peak of the cheekbone, which lets more light in. Raphael gets away with that because he’s modulating the changes in a way that isn’t surprising.

Fifth, the lines should taper. This is a product of line weight decreasing from the middle of the line to the end. Blunt hatch lines can work, but they tend to look like they’re on the form instead of being the form.

With those points in mind, there’s no particular trick to cross-hatching. Any lines that work as hatching will work as cross-hatching. The main problem to watch out for is that it’s possible to obliterate the paper or background, which I started to do on the right here. Sometimes that can look blotchy.

This is Michelangelo. It’s a chalk drawing, but the above applies.

The converse point is also true—lines that don’t work as hatching tend to look like garbage as cross-hatching. The unwanted effects compound.

One way to drive the technique home is to draw a few thousand of these. I call it the Basic Ball. It’s an invented drawing of a sphere with four components: light, midtone, shadow, and cast shadow.

When you’re comfortable with that, upgrade to the Premium Ball, which adds a highlight to the light and a reflected light to the shadow. Note that this is entirely imaginary. Artists typically impose this scheme on the model even when working from life. Note also that getting a proper highlight in a drawing in dark ink on light paper is a mighty challenge. I’ll explain why shortly.

Most any Western drawing you see from 1400 to 1900 is an elaboration on the Premium Ball. This is an Andrea del Sarto. The head is either invented or adapted from another work. Notice the underside of his jaw, where del Sarto has bounced in some reflected light. Typically artists haven’t done this because they observed it, but because the six-part modeling system associated with the Premium Ball is good at conveying mass. This too is a chalk drawing, and it’s striking how often Renaissance artists would hatch with chalk even though it’s capable of tonal shading.

Back to pen and ink: here’s Michelangelo again. On a value scale, 1 being black or the maximum dark allowed by the medium and 10 being white or the maximum light allowed by the paper, what you can do with a pen in the 7 to 9 range is pretty restricted. This is why it’s hard to make proper highlights. Pen shines in the 2-6 range, where you can build up luminous shadows that let the paper show through. That’s a rich area to push on when you’re working in pen. You need a sharp steel pen, good drawing ink, and a decent sheet of paper to approach this.

Another artist who bears mentioning is Edward Gorey. Referring to our 1-10 value scale, it’s common for Gorey drawings to jump from 7 to 10. Anything approaching white is made white. The buildup is happening in the 1-7 range, with whites popping out like firecrackers. I have additional comments about his work in the review I wrote of the 2011 Gorey exhibition at the Boston Athenæum.

That’s a goodly portion of what you need to know about pen and ink, at least when it comes to hatching modeled form. I hope this has been helpful. Reach out with any questions.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Next titles in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club will appear shortly at the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

Glittering Images proceeded to the end in the same spirit of erudition and wonderment that characterizes the rest of the book. It was particularly amusing to move between Tamara de Lempicka’s “cocaine-fueled bisexual adventures in seedy riverside bars” to Piet Mondrian’s extolling the artist as “asexual” and a “spiritual hermaphrodite,” with the only concession to female companionship an artificial tulip in the room adjoining the studio. The chapter on Mondrian is especially astute.

Clarity of edge was crucial to Mondrian’s aesthetic. He used a ruler and strips of transparent paper tape but mainly relied on his own eye and “intuition.” He made constant minute adjustments, sometimes no bigger than a half centimeter. In the 1930s, he decreased the size of his color planes and increased the number of black lines, producing an animated rhythm. But his primary goal was always alignment and balance, as typified by Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, dating from 1930, midway through his abstract period. The painting consists of seven rectangles of varied sizes evenly threaded by uniform black lines, except for two short, fat horizontals. The vivid red area is unusually large, looking forward to Mark Rothko’s hovering color-field paintings, which that artist too described in spiritual terms. While Mondrian’s painting is square, the red patch deceptively is not: it’s very slightly wider than it is tall. In a letter to the patron who commissioned this painting, Mondrian identified his reds with the “real,” the earthly realm. Red here is a glorious blast, filling its broad plane, while touches of cerebral blue and vital yellow discreetly comment from the margins.

The last five decades of art so little resemble that of the prior three millennia that the concerns were bound to shift. Her encomium of Andy Warhol in no way redeems him for me. I was not expecting it might. I appreciated learning about Eleanor Antin, though the fact that she got three illustrations to everyone else’s one seemed to break the book’s format. Paglia also impressed me with her ability to discuss Renée Cox’s computationally intensive use of ‘90s-era Photoshop with the same appreciation that she brought to Mondrian’s facture. I have spent relatively little time thinking about the art typified by these latter examples, but all the more reason to give Paglia her due when discussing them.

The last chapter, though? On the Mustafar duel concluding Revenge of the Sith? Absolutely not.

The Mustafar duel, which took months of rehearsal, with fencing and saber drills conducted by sword master Nick Gillard, was executed by Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor at lightning speed. It is virtuosic dance theater, a taut pas de deux between battling brothers, convulsed by attraction and repulsion. Their thrusts, parries, and slashes are like passages of aggressive speech. It is one of the most passionate scenes ever filmed between two men, with McGregor close to weeping. The personal drama is staged against a physical one: wrangling and wrestling, Anakin and Obi-Wan fall against the control panels of a vast mineral-collection plant, which now starts to malfunction and fall to pieces. As the two men run and leap for their lives, girders, catwalks, and towers melt and collapse into the lava, demonstrating the fragility of civilization confronted with nature’s brute primal power. Lucas crosscuts to the delirious destruction on Coruscant of the Great Rotunda of the Galactic Senate, with its thousand round balconies in cool tonalities of gray and black. This twinned ruination of industrial and political architecture is an epic Romantic spectacle, like split parts of J. M. W. Turner’s eyewitness painting of the catastrophic burning of the British Houses of Parliament in 1834 (Cleveland Museum of Art). Williams’s thunderous choral score, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, has the implacable charge of a Black Mass. The sound mix, overseen by Lucas, is unnerving: a tempest of roars, hisses, sputters, clangs, and splashes goes shockingly blank and silent when Anakin’s arm and legs are severed midair. He falls heavily to the ground, where he crawls like a serpent with demonic yellow eyes before he catches fire and is half-incinerated.

I rewatched it. It’s just as incomprehensible as when I first saw it in 2005.

The young Christensen can’t act his way out of a paper bag, particularly compared to McGregor. For all the work that went into the set, the funhouse effect of the falling towers and floating platforms is not the least menacing. The swordplay is abominable and takes place mostly in the dark, with confusion amplified by the fact that both lightsabers are blue. Lightsaber duels are supposed to hearken back to swashbucklers of the early 20th century. But when Errol Flynn fought Basil Rathbone, not only was the duel magnificent, there was acting going on that reinforced the stakes of the plot and the characters so that the fighting meant something.

One of the ongoing complaints about Star Wars lightsaber duels is how often the combatants pirouette, which from a combat standpoint is like handing your opponent an embossed invitation to lop your head off. For fun, count how many times McGregor and Christensen turn their backs on each other in the Mustafar duel. Then do the same for Flynn and Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Spoiler alert: the latter count is zero.

If we’re going to accept Paglia’s premise, that the kind of mass cultural effect that would have inhered in the work of “early masters of avant-garde modernism” is now only available in popular filmmaking, then the correct choice of artwork for the last chapter would have been Zhang Ziyi wielding Green Destiny versus Michelle Yeoh wielding everything else in the room in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from five years earlier.

First of all, Michelle Yeoh had spent the better part of two decades doing her own stunts in action roles, including some opposite Jackie Chan. Secondly, this is some of the best wire-fu in the history of the genre. Thirdly and most importantly, throughout the match, the actors remain in character, with Yeoh’s maturity and sense of duty contrasting with Zhang’s impudence and dawning realization that she’s in over her head. In contrast, McGregor and Christensen slash incoherently at each other, pausing only to deliver George Lucas’s signature dialogue, for which a characterization of “wooden” would be an insult to lumber.

Anyhow.

From the introduction:

This book was inspired by my dismay at the open animosity toward art and artists that I have heard on American AM talk radio over the past two decades. As a lifelong radio fan, I listen with great enjoyment around the clock to political and sports shows, whose call-in format provides a lively forum for scathingly direct working-class and lower-middle-class voices heard nowhere else in American culture. The arts are sheltered on FM radio, home to National Public Radio and the BBC World Service, with their measured pace and plummy tones, but even there, classical music stations are vanishing. On populist AM radio, particularly on conservative shows, the ruling view among both hosts and callers is that the art world is a sterile dead zone of elitist snobs and that artists are pretentious parasites and con men.

I wonder to what degree Paglia succeeded in her “attempt to reach a general audience for whom art is not a daily presence.” Here she is on Pollock:

Out of his competitive zeal for Picasso came the first works to win Pollock attention—ominous paintings of shadowy, totemic figures executed in a cryptic, semiabstract style. Pollock’s reputation for violence began early: he had always been a nasty binge drinker (acquaintances said he had a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality), but now his pictures veered toward the grotesque. An untitled 1938–40 painting, later called Naked Man with Knife, shows a muscle-bound assailant grappling with a contorted victim in what could be a ritual sacrifice; the composition is choked and churning, a writhing mass of blood-brown knots of flesh. This stunning emotional turbulence was the “expressionism” in Pollock’s new style—a welling up of anguish from the artist’s tortured inner life. The modern artist, Pollock insisted, works “from within,” “expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”

I don’t see the AM radio crowd going for this. But I enjoyed it immensely. She conveyed the outline of history duly, while delivering enough detail to hook the reader. Walter de Maria of Lightning Field fame left the band that would become the Velvet Underground! Feminist performance artists in Los Angeles were moved to public protest by the great Kiss Love Gun album cover!

Most of all, she can see art, really well.

Les Demoiselles is staged like a tableau vivant. The woman standing at left lifts a heavy curtain, while her opposite bursts like a wind into the tentlike space. On a stool at lower right, a nude sits with legs brazenly spread. The two apparently upright central figures are actually reclining with arms behind their heads, a white sheet draping their legs. Picasso’s startling conflation of two points of view was revolutionary. Ever since the Renaissance, perspective had been based on the spectator’s fixed position, reproducing where the painter had set his easel. Here, however, we stand on the brothel floor and also hover near the ceiling—a duality not seen since Byzantine art.

Multiple perspective, soon to be a hallmark of Cubism, also applies to the spiderlike sitter: we view her legs and bare buttocks from behind, but her torso demonically twists to make her head and arms face forward. She is resting her menacingly boomerang-like chin on her fist. The reclining ladies are also hybrid: their eyes and faces are frontal, while their noses are profiled. Picasso’s disjunctive method is partly derived from Cézanne, whose sloping country tabletops are imitated here in the giddily angled coffee table.

I hope the book found some smartypants in AM Radioland to appreciate it as much as I did.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Next titles in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club will appear shortly at the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

Suppose, God forbid, that your biopsy results came back and the news was bad. Would you pursue the recommended treatment, or take to vaguely admitting that you’re ill, going on with life as you’ve lived it, and letting yourself be eaten from the inside?

Douglas McLennan of ArtsJournal has begun to issue weekend summaries of the stories that appear in his newsletter over the course of the week. This sometimes amounts to interpreting Rorschach blots, but I’m not opposed to the exercise. Here was his missive from Saturday:

The Venice Biennale, one of the visual arts world’s most important events, opened Saturday in complete disarray. The EU pulled its funding. Earlier in the week the jury resigned over which countries should be eligible. The Golden Lion — the coveted grand prize — was scrapped for a people’s choice vote. The US pavilion sits nearly empty after the Trump administration declared it wanted work to “reflect and promote American values” (talk about your metaphors). Iran withdrew. Anish Kapoor said the US should be banned outright. Pussy Riot stormed the Russian pavilion in pink balaclavas. Artists went on strike. This is what happens when an institution of cultural authority can no longer agree on its own basic terms — who gets in, who decides, and what its prize actually means.

“Artists went on strike”? Why? “In protest over Israel’s continued participation,” as it happens.

Dries Verhoeven, the artist representing the Netherlands at this year’s event, said on Friday that he had shut his pavilion to show his “disgust” at the Biennale’s decision to allow Israel a platform given the “darkness” in Gaza.

So did artists associated with Belgium, Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and other countries whose histories of colonialism are such that you would have to run Gaza Wars back-to-back for centuries to match the death tolls. France invaded Algeria in 1830 to get out of paying millions of francs owed to Jewish financiers in North Africa who had brokered loans from the Algerian regency. By 1875, French forces had killed 825,000 Algerians, more than Palestinians were killed in the Gaza War by a factor of eleven. Six months ago, Algeria passed a law declaring that French colonial rule there was a genocide. The idea that modern Jews owe modern Europeans moral accountability for the movements of history, either past or in the making, is deranged. I invite those who closed their Venice Biennale pavilions in performative umbrage about Israel to throw themselves into a picturesque canal.

You can click through McLennan’s article and discover the motivations for the strikes. But you can’t un-elide the the non-mention of the mob of keffiyeh-wearing protesters who forced the closure of the Israel pavilion, chanting “from the river to the sea,” which is an express call to slaughter all the Jews in Israel and disperse their nation. It has been such ever since the PLO began using it as a slogan in the late 1960s, and no one pretended otherwise until its contemporary evocation collided with a prior decade of progressive “antiracism.”

Back to McLennan:

…if cultural institutions — of course self-interested and self-promoting as ever — have diminished cultural authority in the broader culture, and critics and prizes have declined in influence as slightly more independent declarers of “quality” or standards, and if even notions of quality have transferred from evaluating the work itself to toting up the algorithmically-optimized attention and engagement that “content” generates, what’s the role of an arts institution or a creative field in a sorting environment built around algorithms, communities, and platforms they don’t operate? … [The Biennale is] an old cultural institution suffering an identity crisis caused by threats to its relevance. Most of the older sorting machines are losing relevance more quietly and perhaps it’s those that should worry us more.

We should worry about all of them. They have Stage Four cancer of the ethos. It won’t do to tiptoe around naming the symptoms of Jew-hatred and related political opportunism.

In 2020, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas suggested that Covid had been manufactured in a lab in Wuhan. The New York Times ran the article “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” calling the suggestion a “conspiracy theory.” American intelligence organizations now assume that the explanation is true. As of this morning, the Times was standing behind reporting by Nicholas Kristof that the Israeli Defense Forces had trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. Sourcing on the story is garbage. People professionally familiar with dogs have characterized the scenario as biologically and behaviorally unsound. In mixing reporting on founded allegations of prisoner abuse with balderdash, it is following a pattern exemplified by Arab-language propaganda about the Danish cartoon controversy, which reprinted cartoons published by the Jyllands-Posten with other, more inflammatory images that deceitful actors said the paper had published but did not. But the Times denies that Kristof’s reporting of a patent conspiracy theory is faulty, or that they published the story to get ahead of an analysis published by CNN on the same day documenting systematic rape and sexual mutilation by Hamas in the October 7 attacks.

Moral failures like this outweigh responsible reports at the paper even if they don’t outnumber them. And what’s going on at the New York Times is typical of our institutions. Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has restated his opposition to censorship, but his principles are getting overrun by clowns like Verhoeven. Matthew Teitelbaum started his tenure at the MFA Boston by capitulating to the moral thugs associated with the Kimono Wednesdays protests and ended it by capitulating to the moral thugs associated with the Philip Guston cancellation. Saher Alghorra, who produced a photograph widely circulated as illustrating famine in Gaza, but in fact depicted a child severely underweight from a medical disorder—The New York Times, again, had to retract a claim that the mother said the child was healthy before the conflict—was just awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “his haunting, sensitive series showing the devastation and starvation in Gaza resulting from the war with Israel.” The Yale student who became the ugly icon for social justice in 2017 by screaming at Nicholas Christakis was subsequently granted the school’s Nakanishi Prize. Several major universities have surrendered hundreds of millions of dollars to the Department of Justice rather than endure investigations into the treatment of Jews on their campuses over the last three years. Boston University denied financial impropriety after Ibram Kendi turned $43 million into smoke; now he’s teaching at Howard and has a new book out.

Do these institutions often produce good news stories, publish useful scholarship, and reward worthy recipients? Of course. When you have cancer, do you consist entirely of cancer? Of course not. Cancer doesn’t kill by cellular majority, but by systemic malignancy.

At some point, our institutions—or an overriding cohort within them—decided to stop being mechanisms of discovery and start being mechanisms of control. They’re not passively “losing relevance,” they’re actively betraying their proper role in the world.

If I were a self-righteous midwit like Ibram Kendi or Adolf Hitler, I would take the analogical conceit of this essay to its rhetorical conclusion and demand an application of surgeries, amputations, and radiation beams on the illness in the ethoic body. But I’m in the ethoic body, along with everyone else. My worry is how to avoid becoming one of the cancer cells.

If I’m correct, the institution-as-control-mechanism is less interested in a particular politics than in resource extraction, modeled on the manner in which Charles X moved 34,000 troops into Sidi Ferruch rather than make good on debts owed to the Algerian Dey. This would be hard to prove, but my theory is that American politics is getting crazier as the debt-to-GDP ratio nears 100%, which it recently passed, and will become crazier still as it approaches 2. The line is more psychological than economic, but the threshold indicates that there’s decreasing wealth to be amassed via capitalism (that is, free markets), leaving opportunities only in the realm of corporatism (business opportunities made directly or indirectly possible by government schemes, such as the twenty-year effort to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan), philanthropy (see, among other projects, the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research), and public finance shenanigans (for instance, Albany’s recent $4 billion bailout of New York City). I’ll refer henceforth to this wide class of activities as “extractionism.” It’s the socioeconomic analogue of cancer.

Extractionism necessitates the elevation of real problems into manufactured emergencies that require such interventions. But the interventions must never solve the emergencies. Examples are too many to name. Educational and education-related outcomes have deteriorated as long as the Department of Education has existed. DEI workplace trainings are known to worsen racial relations. Contemporary nuclear power technology could massively reduce carbon emissions, but activists pursue renewables at enormous expense to the environment. California spent $24 billion on the homeless from 2019 to 2024, and in that time their numbers increased by 30,000. Conservative causes can also be milked, but as conservatives become increasingly anti-war, the remaining big money is in progressive concerns. The key is not the progressivism, but the manipulability.

How easy am I to manipulate? I am manipulable to the extent that I can be convinced to hate anyone. People who hate Trump, or the woke, or Israel, or progressives, or racism, or Russia, or conservatives, or Mamdani—whatever—are just gears in the machinery of extractionism. Insist on seeing the humanity in all people, and in your small way, you are defeating the worst exploitation going on in the world. You can’t get a mob of Jews to surround a mosque in Brooklyn and shout genocidal slogans. But you can get anti-Israel activists to surround a synagogue in Brooklyn and shout genocidal slogans, so they become the sources of chaos that the extractionists need to draw attention away from the fact that unfunded federal liabilities in the United States are $344,000 per person and growing. Eventually anti-Zionism will start to look shabby just like “antiracism” started to look shabby in 2023, and the extractionists will have the next ego trip picked out for them. The keffiyehs will go in the closet next to the Black Lives Matter t-shirts and the pussy hats.

Pushing back on this requires first-principles political awareness, but not only that. There is a reason that so many advocates of universal love and forgiveness—Jesus, Akiva, al-Hallaj, Arjan, and many more—were martyred by the state. They were the least controllable humans ever to walk the planet. I would revive interest in such figures and their spiritual descendants, as used to be more common among artists—Hyman Bloom, Morris Graves, Bill Viola. Even a confirmed sybarite like Henry Miller figured out that the freedom he sought was existential. From “Creative Death,” collected in The Wisdom of the Heart:

In a way the artist is always acting against the time-destiny movement. He is always a-historical. He accepts Time absolutely, as Whitman says, in the sense that any way he rolls (with tail in mouth) is direction; in the sense that any moment, every moment, may be the all; for the artist there is nothing but the present, the eternal here and now, the expanding infinite moment which is flame and song. And when he succeeds in establishing this criterion of passionate experience (which is what Lawrence meant by “obeying the Holy Ghost”) then, and only then, is he asserting his humanness. Then only does he live out his pattern as Man. Obedient to every urge—without distinction of morality, ethics, law, custom, etc. He opens himself to all influences—everything nourishes him. Everything is gravy to him, including what he does not understand—particularly what he does not understand.

In these ever more dire circumstances, we people, we artists, must make a choice. We can either follow great beings to liberation, or follow The New York Times into hell.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

Scott Alexander continues to grapple with the problem of taste in art. I applaud his doing so. But he is as qualified for the task as I am to critique statements about psychiatric pharmacology, which is his metier. This is no fault of his except in the neglect of reading some extremely specialized and abstruse literature, for which I begrudge no one.

The title of this essay is taken from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, in which Chögyam Trungpa describes how the ego uses the mechanisms of enlightenment to reinforce itself.

Ego is able to convert everything to its own use, even spirituality. For example, if you have learned of a particularly beneficial meditation technique of spiritual practice, then ego’s attitude is, first to regard it as an object of fascination and, second to examine it. Finally, since ego is seeming solid and cannot really absorb anything, it can only mimic. Thus ego tries to examine and imitate the practice of meditation and the meditative way of life. When we have learned all the tricks and answers of the spiritual game, we automatically try to imitate spirituality, since real involvement would require the complete elimination of ego, and actually the last thing we want to do is to give up the ego completely. However, we cannot experience that which we are trying to imitate; we can only find some area within the bounds of ego that seems to be the same thing. Ego translates everything in terms of its own state of health, its own inherent qualities.

So it is with artistic reality and thinking. Thinking is capable of mighty feats of categorization and analysis. But artistic reality is a larger domain. To access it, thinking is necessary but not sufficient. As I’ve noted in the past, a decades-long effort has gone into expanding access to art from the relatively few people who can see (in the sense of taste) to the relatively many people who can read. Thinking has played a crucial role in that effort, and it can claim successes. I am not an anti-conceptualist. I doubt, along with Clement Greenberg, that form and content can be distinguished for the purpose of analyzing them in isolation, or either of them from the social aspect of taste formation. But also along with Greenberg, I am primarily interested in effect, which is the emanative aspect of artistic reality. Effect cannot be apprehended by thinking. It can only be intuited and felt.

The case of materialism I’m objecting to here is the demand that art effect reveal itself upon the performance of certain procedures. Scott is making this mistake, and so is some of the art he’s critiquing, though in a different way. Art effect requires sensitized objects to come into the presence of sensitized attention.

Trungpa’s authorities for his statements are the masters of the Kagyu lineage. Mine are Wilhelm Worringer and Mikel Dufrenne. Each of them was a mighty intellect known primarily for a single work: Abstraction and Empathy (which we read in two parts in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club) and The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, respectively. Worringer is especially relevant to Scott’s essay because he singles out Klee’s Angelus Novus for a critique that Klee and his circle refuted with claims derived from Abstraction and Empathy, and it’s interesting to see the argument rehashed a century later.

Burning Steak

Scott posits a scenario in which a truly discerning restaurant critic has meals delivered to him blindly so he’s not influenced by ambience, the chef’s backstory, and whatnot, so as to judge solely how the food tastes. This he likens to a randomized control trial’s ability to filter out confounders.

The analogy raises a substantive question about how closely gustatory delectation maps to visual delectation. At a basic level it may. But challenges to the premises of visual art can be attempted that would be unendurable if made to the premises of cuisine. I’ll return to this.

Also, it neglects the full scope of restaurant criticism as a literary genre. As readers, we don’t only want to know how the food tastes, although that’s crucial. We would also like to know how pleasant it was to dine there, what the atmosphere was like, how the service treated us, and whether the chef has an interesting angle on cooking.

The hypothetical blind restaurant reviewer for whom Scott thinks we should make room would be performing the kind of criticism for which art’s formalist critics were rightly condemned, including by no less than the supposed formalist critic Clement Greenberg. Someone once made a crack about a formalist critic getting an audience in front of a Last Judgment, and talking about the abstract composition without ever referencing the contents of the Book of Revelation. Of course, yammering about Christian eschatology without ever getting around to how the artist handled the picture would also be a miss. The point is that quality is situated, and you can’t fully address the quality without also addressing the situation.

“I suppose it’s true that making a visually appealing dish succeeds at delighting the senses no less than making something delicious,” concedes Scott, sort of. “Even getting to hear about the chef’s dumb childhood in Sardinia is potentially part of the ‘experience,’ if you like this sort of thing.” He says so with the point that some critics should be allowed to disregard everything extrinsic to how the food tastes. But Sardinia has a distinct cuisine, and knowing that the chef is Sardinian gives us indicators about what qualities we should be looking for in the food in his restaurant. Thoreau: “Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.” Taste, even in food, is not merely sensory. Isolating sensory data does not give us a full reading of taste, and knowledge mediates what sensory data appear to us in the first place.

Scott once posted a quiz that mixed AI-generated images and human-made images, and challenged readers to distinguish them. Referencing this, he asked, “If you randomized-controlled-trialled art so mercilessly that all the novelty effects and context effects and pattern language effects got eliminated, would Beauty be what was left?” The answer is No. What’s left would be decontextualized sensory impressions that may or may not be pleasurable, but would be missing the holism implied by “Beauty.”

Crushed by Statuary

In Scott’s next scenario, you go to a museum and see a Renaissance sculpture. It is magnificent—you experience awe and are henceforth transformed. Later you find out that it was in fact “made c. 1995 by a Boomer from Ohio, who mass-manufactured it and sold copies to rich dentists to put in their McMansions.” Was your experience wrong or faulty? He then flips it again: “Suppose that a sense of artistic responsibility (or a sense of cringe) causes you to root these feelings out of yourself, until you can only regard the sculpture with snide contempt—and then the curator tells you that the placard was a prank, and the sculpture was by Michelangelo after all? Scott’s point is that if you “genuinely believe in the power of art to awe and transform, it’s strange to also care about its novelty and provenance.”

What would be strange is that connoisseurship was so arbitrary. Being told that a given sculpture was made by Michelangelo is akin to knowing that our chef is Sardinian. It indicates that we should be looking for Michelangesque qualities in the work, not in a general “great Renaissance sculpture” sense, but in the handwriting of a specific man’s wielding of the chisel. Present here is a qualitative specificity that does not reduce to a checklist that you can put into words. Effect is in that qualitative specificity.

To answer the question, if you were in awe and were henceforth transformed because you got the Renaissance Experience™ in the way that you thought you were supposed to, according to what you gathered from the experts, then your awe and transformation were ersatz and you deserve your subsequent disappointment. If instead it hit you like a blow to the chest and you couldn’t stop thinking about it, your experience was substantive. All that’s missing is some refinement of taste that will remedy itself as you investigate the sculpture tradition, which is vast. Let me tell you, if you thought Boomerangelo was great, the Bernini Proserpina in the Borghese Gallery will knock you into the wall. I’ve been there. I have attempted to sculpt marble. There is no way that a sculptor working in the mid-Nineties for mass production could have reached that level of quality. I can accept Scott’s hypothetical as such, but not as a real-world illustration.

Lurking behind Scott’s remarks on this topic is disdain for the possibility that some people really do have good eyes.

Most Critics Are Bad and Should Feel Bad

…there is a million-item checklist every modern book must follow not to get panned as “gauche” or “unsophisticated”, and almost no great book of the past followed any of these rules. The Iliad certainly didn’t. … When I ask art critics about this, they say that it would sound ridiculous to write a Homeric-style epic poem today. … [But] if critics make a pact to excoriate any book more than 5% different from the median Jonathan Franzen novel, then every book outside that 5% margin of error will sound weird and jarring and involve a conscious decision to ruin one’s own career. … We’ve just gotten stuck in a bad equilibrium. Insofar as there’s such a thing as Art—as opposed to mere sophistication—shouldn’t its chief job should be to escape?

Yes. Most critics are not worth a bag of wet saltines. You should not make art for them.

But the critics questioned above are correct that to write an un-self-conscious Homeric epic in our year would be a silly exercise. A self-conscious one might work. Much of the problem of making art in the 21st century is to avoid repeating the past while not chasing after the latest thing, which is almost certainly an evolutionary local minimum.

Critics, as a rule, couldn’t organize a pact to continue breathing. But with few exceptions, they are sled dogs for consensus institutional taste. This year’s Venice Biennale, with the theme “We Will Not Suffer a Jew to Live” “In Minor Keys,” is basically an exercise in how far extremist progressives can drag moderate progressives into extremism. The United States representative is Alma Allen. The selection of Allen is thought to be the product of unspecified pressure from the Trump administration. Sure enough, here’s ArtNews:

The United States is in a sad state of affairs. That wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who reads or watches the news, or even just scrolls social media and skims the headlines. But you would also know it if you happened to walk by the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, where the American representative this year, Alma Allen, has installed five extremely unremarkable sculptures in front of the building, along with some 20 works inside.

It’s a sharp turn from how the US Pavilion has looked the last couple of times around. The previous two artists to take over the pavilion, Simone Leigh (2022) and Jeffrey Gibson (2024), sought to radically transform the Palladian structure in the center of the Giardini, built in 1930. Despite their drastically different approaches, both artists sought to surface the history of colonialism and empire at the core of the United States’ founding and present.

This is as awful as it looks, with the critic punishing this year’s artist for being white and not rehashing the progressive bromides that have been on display at the American pavilion for the last two Biennali. What may look like a cabal is just banality, cowardice, and a herd mentality so acute that an actual sheep would find it embarrassing.

The History of the Angel of History

After praising an especially fine passage of Walter Benjamin admiring the Klee Angelus Novus, Scott sought out the painting. “I guarantee you that you will not be prepared for the actual Angelus Novus painting. Whatever you imagine it to be, it’s not that. I read Benjamin’s commentary first and I Googled Angelus Novus second, and I thought somebody was playing some kind of prank. Better if I had never seen it, and had kept the beauty of Benjamin’s prose unsullied in my mind. Still, if you insist on looking, you can see it here.”

I wish Scott had articulated why he was so disappointed. I’ve looked at a lot of Klee, so I knew not to expect an image like would have been made by William Blake or Gustave Doré or another angel-depictor. But that Scott’s objections ought to be self-evident is the sort of assumption that Worringer sought to abolish in 1906. Worringer contended that whether a culture produced mimetic art or abstracted art lay downstream of the quality of its volition. Optimistic peoples with relatable gods, like the Hellenistic Greeks, produced mimetic art. Anxious peoples with indifferent, inscrutable gods, such as the Egyptians, produced abstract art. The shape of a given art was decided by a “psychic attitude toward the cosmos.” Klee was paraphrasing Worringer when he said that “The more horrifying the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.”

The art historical canard in Worringer’s younger years was that Gothic art develops into Renaissance art, and the former should be viewed as an inferior stage. But Gothic art has much to recommend that was lost when European sculptors became more mimetic. Worringer was among the first to say that the art of the High Renaissance was not a measuring stick for all other art ever made, though Zola said as much when writing about Manet a couple of decades earlier. Worringer warned that we should evaluate the art of a culture “not from our, but their own suppositions.” Scott returns to a food analogy:

Even if you think that dialectic and “being part of the conversation” is important, it’s obnoxious and in some sense parasitic to demand that it occupy the same part of semantic space as sensory delight. Imagine that you go to a restaurant and the food tastes terrible. When you complain to the chef, he objects “Ah, but this is a response to Mario Alberti’s famous meal of 1974, trying to demonstrate that the difference between lasagna and tortellini is only in your mind. Didn’t you catch that the juxtaposition between cloves and truffle salt represents the juxtaposition between fascism and the superego?”

I’ve made analogies like this too. It’s fine, to illustrate that we ought not put up with art humbug in the way that we’re sometimes asked. But it also illustrates that the expressive range of visual art is greater than that of cooking. It’s not the zinger that Scott thinks it is.

The related point, “If the whimsical adversarial philosophical point-scoring game has the same name as the creating-beautiful-things game, everyone will get confused, and only one of them can survive,” is more trenchant. Directionally, I agree with it. But it’s not necessarily going to be practicable to disentangle them. What might have been called pure conceptualism was only made for two or three decades, starting in the 1950s. (The original Duchamp Fountain from 1917 was only considered significant once Sidney Janis commissioned new versions of it in the 1950s.) While I work in something close to an art-for-art’s-sake mode, more than a few readers of this blog are engaged simultaneously in conceptual and aesthetic efforts, responding to current events obliquely. Those projects have as much chance of succeeding artistically as mine, all things being equal.

Dolphin What?

In 1920, declaring a urinal to be art had never been done before, but Duchamp ruined that one, guess the next step is sharks in formaldehyde. Next year it’ll be, I don’t know, a baby with a dolphin pancreas on its head. People will say the same boring things - “This challenges us to ask whether a baby with a dolphin pancreas on its head can truly be art - the answer may surprise you!” Some rich person will buy it for $200 million as part of a tax evasion scheme. The people who scoffed at Dolphin Pancreas Baby will get told that by expressing an opinion at all, they are participating in exactly the kind of conversation that Dolphin Pancreas Baby was meant to evoke, and therefore retroactively vindicating its existence.

I agree, this kind of thing is boring. Here’s where I jump screaming off the train of conceptualism. Art about the nature of art is for rich losers.

If anything it understates the scope of the problem. Dufrenne:

The opposite of the beautiful is not the ugly, as we have known since Romanticism. The opposite of the beautiful is the abortive, in the case of the work which claims to be an aesthetic object, and the indifferent, in the case of the object which makes no such claim. This implies that the aesthetic object can be imperfect: who will dispute it? But we cannot measure the aesthetic object’s imperfection by some external standard. It is imperfect because it does not succeed in being what it claims to be, because it does not realize its essence; and it is in terms of what it aspires to be that it must be judged and that it judges itself. If Picasso’s harlequins sought to be Watteau’s figures, they would be failures—as would Byzantine frescoes if they aimed at being Greek paintings, and modal music if it aspired to be tonal. But if an object makes no claim to being aesthetic, it has not failed. It can even be beautiful in its own sphere, as a tool or a tree is beautiful. But it is essential to the aesthetic object that it be aesthetic: it makes promises that it must keep. In other words, it is essential to an aesthetic object that it embody its own norm—not a norm which our thinking or taste imposes on it, but one which it imposes on itself or which its creator has imposed on it. …whatever the means of a work may be, the aim it sets itself in order to be a masterpiece is fullness of sensuous being and of the meaning immanent in the sensuous. Now, the work is truly meaningful in its unique way only if the artist is authentic: it says something only if he has something to say, if he truly wants to say something. … The norm of the aesthetic object is its will to the absolute. And to the extent that the aesthetic object proclaims and attains this norm, the object itself becomes in turn a norm for aesthetic perception. Thus the aesthetic object assigns to aesthetic perception the task of approaching the work of art without any prejudice, of giving it as much credit as possible, of placing it in a position to furnish the proof of its being.

Basically, it is not we who decide what is beautiful. The object itself decides, and it does so by manifesting itself. The aesthetic judgment is passed from within the object rather than within us. We do not define the beautiful, we ascertain what the object is. And, in probing the aesthetic object in general, we must no longer look for its specific difference in a definition of the beautiful. Not that we refuse all use of the idea of beauty or challenge the judgment of taste; in deciding to refer to universally admired works, we are tacitly subscribing to this judgment. But what we ask of it is not to supply the criterion of the aesthetic object but to recommend the works which will most reliably manifest this criterion—i.e., works which are aesthetic objects to the fullest extent. Thus an aesthetics is possible which does not reject aesthetic valuation yet is not subservient to it. It is an aesthetics which recognizes beauty without creating a theory of beauty, because basically there is no theory to create: there is the stating of what aesthetic objects are, and to the degree that they truly are they are beautiful.

This is what Dolphin Pancreas Baby and its satirized referents are abandoning when they engage in their social games—beauty, yes, but also “meaning immanent in the sensuous.” Every time someone makes Dolphin Pancreas Baby and a collector buys it for a bajillion dollars, passageways to an important source of belonging in the phenomenological world cave in for people who aren’t sure how to reach it, or even know it’s there.

Here’s Trungpa again:

According to the Buddhist tradition, the spiritual path is the process of cutting through our confusion, of uncovering the awakened state of mind. When the awakened state of mind is crowded in by ego and its attendant paranoia, it takes on the character of an underlying instinct. So it is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind, but rather of burning out the confusions which obstruct it. In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product, dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be the possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.

Beauty emanates from the art object when we approach it with an attuned consciousness, and enlightenment emanates from reality when we approach it with an attuned consciousness. Dufrenne again: “the work of art as an empirical reality in the cultural world seems to elude us the moment we question ourselves about its being.” Thinking unlocks certain doors. Walking through them is another matter.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

Zionism, understood in full, is an elevation of Jewish consciousness. Diaspora Judaism amounted to an agreement between Jews and the rest of the world. Jews would dedicate themselves to morality, learning, and faith, and submit to horrifying injustices and periodic mass murders. In return, their host populations would refrain from destroying them utterly while congratulating themselves on their enlightened tolerance. Jews lived as dhimmis in the Muslim world and ghetto-dwellers in Europe, deprived of rights. But they lived.

That deal became intolerable during the Russian pogroms, and European Jews, motivated by other 19th-century reform movements, went in a new direction. Instead of living in supplication and passivity, Zionism reconceived the Jew as muscular and self-determined. Zionists revived Hebrew as a modern language, disdaining Yiddish as a tongue of weakness. Jews with names like Grün and Perlman dropped them in favor of mighty Hebrew constructions like Ben-Gurion and Ben-Yehuda. Jews bought some of the worst real estate in the Levant from the failing Ottomans and established a state there. The young nation of Israel briefly outlawed Yiddish, so determined it was to stamp out the old way of thinking and establish a national image of the Jew as a scholar-warrior with full personhood.

Israel’s response to the October 7 atrocities forever broke what was left of the diaspora deal. In reaction, certain Western conservatives have taken to revelling in ancient impulses that the deal required them to keep down: public reviling of the Jews and all associated with them, blaming the Jews for societal problems that they inflicted upon themselves through lack of intelligence and character. Certain progressives have taken to framing Jews and all associated with them as manifestations of colonialism, capitalism, and racism, according to the miserable narrative that maintains the progressive lifestyle of constant grievance. Many Jews are progressives who are now trying to crawl back into progressive dhimmitude by denouncing Israel. This is also a diasporist deal—the Jews keep their political home at the expense of self-respect and cultural connection, and their progressive host population points to them as supposed counterevidence regarding its abject bigotry.

The latter became an art story as of this year’s Venice Biennale. I don’t even aspire to attend the Biennale, much less be shown in it, not that anyone is offering. I’m having a wonderful time in my studio, with ideas flowing faster than I can manifest them. The flaps in Venice may as well be flapping on another planet. In all candor, the deeper I get into my own projects, the less I care about the “art world” as such. What follows is not a complaint, but a guide for the perplexed, heavily linked to keep it under 2,000 words.1

To recap, Israel’s selection for this year’s entry is the Bucharest-born, Haifa-based Belu-Simion Fainaru, who won the Israel Prize last year. Because the Israel Pavilion is under renovation, Fainaru will show at the Arsenale. A group calling itself the Art Not Genocide Alliance demanded that the Biennale exclude Israel. The Biennale refused, but its jury, with which the Biennale disdains to interfere, announced that it would not consider awards for artists of countries “whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.” That effectively excluded Israel and Russia. ANGA also complained about Fainaru’s relocation to the Arsenale, claiming that to do so violates the curatorial vision of the now deceased Koyo Kouoh and that it would “introduce conditions of violence and fear through the military and police presence that will accompany the Israeli pavilion.” On April 30, all five Biennale jurors resigned without further statements.

The accusations are twaddle. Israel has never committed, and is not now committing, a genocide. Total Palestinian casualties for the run of the Gaza war, from its initiation by Hamas on October 7, 2023 until they returned the body of the last Israeli hostage on January 26 of this year, were estimated by the dubiously reliable Gaza Ministry of Health at 72,000, with combatants and civilians undifferentiated. Back in January, the Khamenei regime killed half that number of Iranian protesters in two days.2 Despite its declared commitment to human rights, ANGA has expressed no objections to Iran’s participation in the Biennale. Its rhetoric about Israel is empty and tendentious.

Regarding the introduction by the Israeli presenters of “conditions of violence and fear,” no police presence around the Fainaru exhibition would be necessary if not for bad actors who have swallowed wholesale the same lies perpetrated by ANGA, and are willing to resort to violence and fear to make their benighted feelings known. “You’re supposed to let us injure you,” says ANGA implicitly, citing the old deal.

As for the ICC charges, they are the work of a British prosecutor named Karim Asad Ahmad Khan. He issued them on May 20, 2024, simultaneously with charges against October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar. The ICC could not bring itself to accuse any Palestinian of criminality until it found a way to pin some on the Israelis responsible for defending their country from it. The ICC is not a neutral judicial body; they are a mouthpiece of European progressive autocracy. Citing the ICC, rather than human rights principles, let the Biennale jury punish Israel and Russia, but not Iran, China, or the newly admitted Qatar. The ICC evidently regards Israel’s refusal to let its citizens be abducted and murdered as a crime tantamount to Hamas’s effort to abduct and murder them. “You’re supposed to let us injure you,” says the ICC implicitly.

Movement progressivism has no coherent philosophy. It is best understood as a kind of iconoclasm against an image with some basis in reality of a modal American family of heterosexual, procreative, economically productive, Judeo-Christian-tradition whites who love their country, and an implacable desire to tear down anyone to the extent that they participate, or want to participate, in the associated ethos. We’ll call that picture the White Image.

Whether Israel is conservative depends on whether your baseline is France or Saudi Arabia. It is not particularly white. But Israelis are natalists and patriots, which is what movement progressives hate most about conservatives. Such progressives regard them, like they regard the large numbers of Vietnamese Americans who voted for Trump, as white. Worst of all from a progressive standpoint, Israelis are optimists, and thus resistant to the manufactured woe that prompts people to join progressive movements. Progressives wanted Israel to respond to the October 7 atrocities by pacifistically granting the Gazans nationhood. That would have been suicidal—supplicative, diasporist abnegation. Israel said no, and counterattacked like any other country on earth would have. Now it is a nation of pariahs, but Israel is thriving.

Meanwhile, Jews in the diaspora are enduring an explosion of antisemitism not seen since the 1930s. Progressive groups, as mentioned above, demand that Jews renounce Israel or be destroyed socially and professionally, particularly in the arts. This should look familiar, because it was lifted entire from the “anti-racism” playbook of the decade leading up to October 7. Assimilated Jews, again, have agreed to that denunciation in significant numbers, according to the incentives that accrued to “good whites” under “anti-racism.” They will finally be judged to be as irredeemable as the “good whites.”

Progressives should have dismissed Ibram Kendi and related figures as fascistic cranks. Instead they tried to reorder American life according to their ideas, succeeded more than they should have, and now they’re gleefully likening Jews to Nazis. This only seems contradictory if you think that “anti-racism” was ever about racism. It was not. It is a prolonged excoriation of the White Image. Progressives are unwittingly proving the Zionists correct that diaspora Judaism is untenable and the only viable home for Jews is Israel.

Conservative anti-Zionism mostly transfers antisemitic tropes from Jews to Israel.3 Progressive anti-Zionism does likewise, but embeds that activity in a framework of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism around which there is a coalition of activists who have little in common except shared hatred of the White Image. ANGA’s Instagram posts are full of comments from progressive whites asking why the Biennale jury didn’t punish the United States along with Israel and Russia. The answer, obviously, is that Trump wasn’t charged by the ICC. But the premise of the question is that they should, or the jury should have acted as if they had.

Implicit in anti-Zionism is an objection to full Jewish personhood. The New School student government did not vote to defund the college’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association and demand that members denounce China’s treatment of the Uyghurs to restore support. But guess what they just did to Hillel. The demand presumes that a Jew has a sub-human, stunted moral consciousness until he demonstrates otherwise. (As if a compelled oath sworn to the New School student government demonstrates it.)

There’s an ongoing debate among Jews these days about how best to combat antisemitism. One side persists at education and dialogue. The other side points out that this has proven useless; we ought instead to devote resources to cultivating Jewish institutions, work with the remaining organizations that haven’t become deranged, pursue creative projects independently, and defend ourselves legally and physically as necessary. While dialogue is still possible at the margins,4 I’m in the latter camp, and the situation at the Biennale demonstrates why. In attempting to accommodate the bigots, dupes, and quislings at ANGA, the jury invited legal trouble upon the Biennale organization, because Fainaru threatened to sue. Their mass resignation obviates that problem. That is how they learn, not through workshops, but through credible promises of justice-seeking and defensive force, executed as needed. Even if they don’t learn to accommodate nuance and alternate perspectives, they learn to shut up, which is almost as good.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

I might have paid more attention in Art History if someone with Camille Paglia’s wit had spiced it with references to gay subculture in Renaissance Florence, Donatello’s psychic struggles with respect to the Catholic Church, British hairstyles of the 17th century, and discussions of aristocratic dress that would permit detailed conversations with a professional historical costumer. Here’s Janson’s, which I am appalled to see selling for $450, on the Death of Marat:

The picture was propaganda. Marat was a deputy in the National Convention and the editor of a populist newspaper. He was a dedicated revolutionary and a defender of the people. But he was also a ruthless man, who was hated and feared. He was so despised that a counterrevolutionary from Caen, one Charlotte Corday, plunged a knife into his chest while he was writing on a portable desk laid across his bathtub, where he spent most of his time due to a lethal skin condition that grossly disfigured him.

David, who had visited Marat the day before, shows him expiring in the tub, still holding in one hand the quill with which he defended the French Republic, and in the other the fake petition Corday used to divert his attention before stabbing him. Like The Oath, David presented this scene with realism, attention to detail, sharp lighting, and planarity. But now he pushes the image much closer to the picture plane, almost to the surface of the canvas, with Marat s writing crate and Corday’s blood-stained knife dramatically thrust into the viewer s space and the figure of Marat just inches behind.

Here’s Paglia:

Because of his “leprous” skin condition (probably arthritic psoriasis), Marat worked and wrote while bathing his emaciated body in sulfur salts, a vinegar-steeped rag (to soothe the fiery itching) wrapping his head. This was how he had received his friend and ally David just the day before. After conversing with Marat about the Girondins, whom she pretended to denounce and he promised to guillotine, Corday stabbed him once in the chest with a butcher knife she had purchased at a Paris shop. The six-inch blade pierced his lung and heart, and he was dead within minutes.

The picture shows none of the tumult that erupted after Marat’s cry for help. Here time has stopped: the gently smiling bather seems asleep and pleasantly dreaming. But in the first angry rush, Corday was knocked to the floor and soon arrested. She spent four days in prison before her trial, where she never wavered in her defense of the righteousness of the murder. She was convicted the same day and immediately sent to the guillotine. It was said that when the executioner held up her severed head and slapped it on the cheek, the other cheek blushed. Madame Tussauds made on-site wax death masks of both Marat and Corday.

Paglia attends to the painting itself as well:

The grisly narrative has been reduced to simple shapes and blocks of color, anticipating modern abstract art. The plain background, like the marble wall of a Roman temple, is daringly diffuse, as if dissolving in the raking light. (It reproduces not Marat’s bleak apartment but David’s Louvre studio with its high windows.) The colors are subdued, except for drips and smudges of blood. The picture is a parable of frugality and civic devotion: L’Ami du peuple (Friend of the People) was the newspaper published by Marat on a printing press in his apartment. The white sheet lining the tub (to cushion his sores) is old and patched, while the nicked wooden crate, converted to a humble side table for ink pot and quills, is rudely studded with nails. David streaked brown paint over white primer to achieve the box’s rough yet beautifully glowing surface.

“Rudely studded with nails.” Pardon me while I swoon.

Conceding that these books have somewhat different missions, Janson’s doesn’t compare to Paglia’s combination of erudition and delectation. I’m reminded of a quote from Henry Miller: “Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” Paglia has delved so deeply into this painting that her scalp itches along with Marat’s. Her intellect prompted her: how would they have treated Marat’s arthritic psoriasis in 18th-century France? By the time she has edified herself, you can smell the vinegar just as you can see David streak the ground of the canvas with ochre. Magnificent.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

This is an incident said to have taken place in the wee hours of February 25, 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” thereafter known popularly as the Secret Speech. It marked the beginning of Soviet de-Stalinization and the start of the Khrushchev Thaw, in which thousands of Russians imprisoned for political reasons were freed. But Khrushchev’s complicity in Stalin’s repressions was suspect, and the Soviet Union remained a miserable and repressive place.

I begin here because it illustrates how socialism requires a forfeiture of conscience in the name of ideals. It typically doesn’t begin with violence, but lofty claims of world betterment. Enemies are routed, then destroyed, on the premise that they’re against the betterment of the world. Finally an autocracy is installed on cynical premises, which then must be dislodged at enormous human cost.

This will be the format for all forthcoming episodes of The Socialist Book of the Dead: twelve panels (intended for two printed pages), with art in black, white, and Communist Crimson. They are destined for an anthology. Your paid subscription helps make the series possible, but it will remain free to read. Buckle up—this ride through the history of socialism will be bumpy.

Wishing you a socialism-free May Day.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.

This book makes me wish that I had the author as an art history teacher. She taught at the University of the Arts in Pennsylvania and was one of the professional casualties of its 2024 closure, upon which I commented.

Paglia’s goal for the book was laudable.

This book is an attempt to reach a general audience for whom art is not a daily presence. I have tried to chart the history and styles of Western art as succinctly and accessibly as possible. The format of the book is based on Catholic breviaries of devotional images, like Mass cards of the saints. The reader is invited to contemplate the work, to see it as a whole, and then to scrutinize its fine details. … Too many art books are victims of the coffee-table syndrome—big, unwieldy, glossily packaged showpieces. H. W. Janson’s nine-hundred-page History of Art, which became an academic staple after its publication in 1962, is a beautiful but intimidating object, weighing seven and a half pounds. Janson’s text is superbly erudite but moves so numbingly fast that discussion of individual works is scanted.

I don’t remember Janson’s as superbly erudite, but endlessly dull. Granted, as an 18-year-old at the Rhode Island School of Design, I wanted nothing to do with art history, history in general, or even reading. I would have been happy doing nothing but gesture drawings for my whole freshman year. I don’t know how I would find it now, but probably not as delectable as this passage of Paglia’s on Queen Nefertari being led by Isis.

At a key point in her travels, Nefertari is welcomed by Isis, who takes her affectionately by the hand and leads her eastward toward the next chamber. The goddess speaks, promising salvation: “Come, King’s great wife, Nefertari, beloved of Mut. I give to thee a place in the Sacred Land.” The queen’s name hovers in two golden cartouches (heraldic ringed medallions). Now she must meet the scrutiny and challenges of the other leading gods, including the sun god Re, the scorpion goddess Serquet, and ibis-headed Thoth. She will make offerings, appeal for aid, and play a chess-like table game (senet) with an invisible opponent, Fate.

Unlike most generalist writers, even good ones, Paglia sees art extremely well.

The queen’s skin is red, close to burnt umber—a striking departure from the yellow tones normally given Egyptian women aristocrats. Her skin surprisingly matches that of the gods and not the goddesses in her tomb. Skin color in Egyptian art was generally a signifier of class rather than race: noblewomen neither worked in the hot sun like peasants nor exercised and waged war in the open like men. Nefertari’s dark skin may refer to her unspecified activity in the public realm, also suggested by her state title, “Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt.” As a masculine motif, her skin color would therefore parallel the pharaoh’s kilt, head cloth, and ceremonial beard appropriated by the formidable Queen Hatshepsut in the prior dynasty. It is also at least theoretically possible that Nefertari, as a daughter of the south, was using mahogany skin tones to claim and promote a Nubian ancestry.

A couple of years ago when we read Only the Lover Sings, I remarked that Josef Pieper had noted, in 1952, that “Man’s ability to see is in decline. …the average person of our time loses the ability to see because there is too much to see!” Here’s Paglia, sixty years later, in the introduction of Glittering Images:

Digital images are sharp and clean but lack the atmospheric shading that cues our sense of contour and depth. Digital color is supersaturated and garish, even cartoonlike, without the subtleties and fine gradations of blended color, used in oil painting since the Renaissance. Digital photographs can seem like unnerving glimpses into the pretty but frozen world of a dollhouse. Digital TVs, set at splashy wide-screen option, spread and stretch the image, imposing distortion on viewers as standard practice. Animated graphics in video games, electronic billboards, and sports telecasting create dizzily swooping compressions and tunnel-like warpings of space. The eye is assaulted, coerced, desensitized.

Pieper’s remedy is “to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see.” Paglia proclaims that “The only road to freedom is self-education in art.” Now it’s fourteen years later still. TikTok, which I avoided since its inception as Chinese spyware, has a new user named @dissident.muse, for marketing reasons. If the media environment of 2012 was an assault, the present one is a carpet bombing. We need Pieper and Paglia and others like them all the more. Yes, I am saying so via Substack, and aware that I am contributing to the problem. But maybe a few of us can administer the cure via the poison. Note to self and anyone reading: stop and look at a thing like it was the only thing.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.

“Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš” is the new show in the Dissident Museum. Please have a look, preferably not on your phone—I built this for a typical computer monitor, and the artists deserve the closer regard.

Subscribe now

Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, edited by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.