Absorption and Theatricality – Page 2

“The Painter’s Revenge”: Fernand Léger For and Against Cinema

In the case of Ballet mécanique, however, it is no longer a question of competing with or dominating spectacular vision from within painting. Opting for a different strategy, Léger works against cinematic absorption and the pseudo-intensity of cinema from within cinema itself.

Sala with Schiller: World, Form, and Play in Mixed Behavior

BY Michael Fried

In other words, following some difficult sentences on contingency, the play drive will “introduce form into matter and reality into form. To the extent that it deprives feelings and passions of their dynamic power, it will bring them into harmony with the ideas of reason; and to the extent that it deprives the laws of reason of their moral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interests of the senses.”

Money is in the Eye of the Beholder

BY Todd Cronan

Marie Claire and affect theory; Gombrich and neoliberalism; reparations for the ugly and the continuing hold of Degenerate art.

Responses to Neoliberal Aesthetics

BY nonsite

Walter Benn Michael’s “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph,” published in our first issue, has generated responses from Michael Clune, Nicholas Brown, and Todd Cronan.

Sonnenuntergang: On Philippe Parreno’s June 8, 1968

BY Michael Fried

…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…