Red Clown

A cloacal emptiness enters Tony. The green waves beneath the balcony come all the way from Morocco. The shafts sink into their breasts. Godlike, he yawns. A thousand maggots fall from his mouth. Enter the bulls. Eyelids coalesce, start a fire. It’s monsters a-go-go from here.

It's All in Your Head

To Walter Benjamin, writing in 1936 and responding to Marinetti’s glorification of war as aesthetic spectacle, fascism represented the consummation of the principle of art for art’s sake. “[Human] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

Picture Imperfect: Encountering Cy Twombly

Narcissus looks into the pool and is captivated by an image. We assume that the image he sees is of himself and so does he. That would seem “self-evident.” But as Lacan noted, the idea that what appears in the mirror is the self, is a profound misperception.

Fresh Paint: Encountering Christopher Wool

On a rainy ray in April I trudged along Wilshire Boulevard and then up Camden Drive in Beverly Hills--which for me has all the charm of a facelifted celebrity face in premature rictus--to take a gander at Christopher Wool’s latest paintings at the Gagosian Gallery. Inside I moved from painting to painting leaving a snail’s trail of water on the polished concrete floor.

Stepping in It: The Excremental in Art

When I paint, what am I really doing? Freud’s answer would be that I’m redirecting the complex of sadistic impulses related to what he called the anal stage toward a different object. Instead of playing with my shit, I smear paint on canvas or paper. To sublimate according to Freud, is to channel the libido and its infantile fixations into activities that yield socially valorized objects.

Warhol and the Poverty of Modernity

Modernism was by and large a heroic attempt to resist capitalism’s desacration of culture by finding a refuge for the sacred within art.

Cyberpeasants of the World Unite!

Any attempt to gain a cultural perspective on a sprawling, metastizing entity like the Web is likely to turn into something that resembles its subject: a heterogeneous jumble of loosely associated mappings, none of which covers the entire territory and any of which can suddenly blink out and be gone without a trace.