Issue #1: Author Artist Audience

Matisse and Picasso: The Redemption and The Fall

Éric Michaud January 25, 2011

We should give ourselves up to the lies of art to deliver ourselves from the lies of myth: it is by this very paradoxical and singular way of absorption into the framework of one of the “great works” of the Occident that Picasso belongs to myth. For if it is true that he always sought to combat myth, making him even more dependent on it, he only succeeded by turning myth’s own arms onto itself—that is, the “lie.”

Paul Valéry’s Blood Meridian, Or How the Reader became a Writer

Todd Cronan January 25, 2011

Poet and critic Paul Valéry held two strong and conflicting views of literary meaning. On the one hand, he affirmed his “verses have whatever meaning is given them.” And in a phrase that entered into the post-modern literary canon, he declared “Once a work is published its author’s interpretation of it has no more validity than anyone else’s.” On the other hand, he suggested that “One is led to a form by a desire to leave the smallest possible share to the reader.” Valéry’s career can be divided along these lines of anti-intentionality and intentionality. My larger claim is to show the primacy, or perhaps the invention of a dominant mode of twentieth- and twenty-first century thought.

Sonnenuntergang: On Philippe Parreno’s June 8, 1968

Michael Fried January 25, 2011

…for me much of what is most immediately gripping in June 8, 1968 turns on the contrast or say the felt difference between the stagedness plus residual “magic” of absorption of the “mourners” and the wholly unselfconscious albeit dramatic, in certain scenes one might say over-the-top beauty of the natural world…

Mysterious Exchange: On Susan Sidlauskas’s Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense

Todd Cronan January 25, 2011

If the agency of color replaces the agency of the artist or the sitter, then what the portraits of Hortense show is a liveliness more animate than any mimetic representation could produce. Indeed, Sidlauskas’s account focuses in detail on Cézanne’s “metaphors of ingestion,” of his “physically absorbing” colors, and of the total identification between the painter and his subjects. Above all, Gasquet provides a vitalist language that best captures Cézanne’s affective forms…

False Gods: Authority and Picasso’s Early Work

Charles Palermo January 25, 2011

Picasso’s early work—his so-called Blue Period, in the present case—responds to a concern, widespread in the symbolist milieu from which the young Picasso emerged, with authority. By authority, this essay understands one’s ability to believe in and respond to a truth as one finds it represented. In this moment, the tasks of representing truth by art and by religion found themselves in dialogue, or even, as one might say, in a relation of mutual self-definition. Charles Morice’s explanations of Eugène Carrière’s works provide the background against which to understand some of Picasso’s Blue Period works, Morice’s remarks on them, and Apollinaire’s vindication of Picasso. Their exchange raises, furthermore, important problems for those of us who write histories and interpretations of art.

Fig. 10. Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, First view, left wing (St. Sebastian), detail.

History and the Work of Art in Sebald’s After Nature

Dorothea von Mücke January 25, 2011

W.G. Sebald’s long poem Nach der Natur (1988) contributed significantly to the swift recognition of his literary talent among fellow writers and poets, yet it received scant attention by the larger public and literary scholars alike. To the English-speaking world it was not even available until 2002, a year after its author’s death, when it appeared in Michael Hamburger’s excellent translation under the title After Nature. Like a triptych, it is divided into three untitled parts, each with a distinct

Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph

Walter Benn Michaels January 25, 2011

The political meaning of the refusal of form (the political meaning of the critique of the work’s “coherence”) is the indifference to those social structures that, not produced by how we see, cannot be overcome by seeing differently. It’s this refusal of form…