The notorious 19th-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who proclaimed that “the urge for destruction is also a creative urge,” has found an unlikely disciple in Trump. Considered together, the 1980 and 2025 episodes teach the lesson that destruction can be a form of authorship. Once the reliefs were gone, their loss defined both the building and its destroyer. The erasure became his signature. Between McFadden’s 1980 account of jackhammers and Broadwater’s 2025 image of roaring machinery there stretches a single, continuous story about the aesthetics of demolition.
Walter Benjamin called the twentieth century “the age of mechanical reproduction,” but his contemporaries were still capable of distinguishing between a celebrity’s real personality and her image. The twenty-first century is the age of digital reproduction, and it forces us to ask whether the general public still possesses the capacity to recognize such a distinction. Tyler Robinson’s text messages discuss Kirk’s murder with shocking callousness, but Robinson was no psychopath. It would be less frightening if he was. The truly scary prospect is that his blithe indifference to the value of human life is becoming typical. We appear to have entered the realm of the “posthuman.”
Posted on July 18, 2025, 8:53 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
Perhaps this is why Alpers is befuddled by today’s disciplinary confusion in which art, the master, is subjugated by art history, supposedly its emissary. Consider the following remark she made in a 2022 follow-up to the earlier conversation with Ziegler: “I agree with my great, late art historian friend Michael Podro, who said that painting has self-substance that insulates it from events and changes in the world of things—political, religious, or personal. Painting just goes along.”
Posted on July 18, 2025, 8:44 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
“Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,” which opened at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco on March 22, is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curated by Timothy Anglin Burgard. Its premise, spelled out in the title, is straight forward enough and firmly based on the […]
A sad reminder of that newer does not mean better, as illustrated by the Getty Center exhibition “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.” The organizers of “Painting Men” which aims to address the shortcomings of Caillebotte scholarship’s “blinkered view” concerning his purported “male bias” and alleged “questioning of masculine identity that seems freshly relevant today” were not deterred […]
The Honarkar Foundation just published a catalogue for their current exhibition LUMINARIES OF LIGHT: PIONEERS OF CALIFORNIA LIGHT AND SPACE MOVEMENT curated by Genevieve Williams. My essay “From Sfumato to Ganzfelds” argues that in order to remove the barriers between the art and its audiences, California Light and Space artists relied on the same four […]
Posted on October 3, 2024, 10:47 AM, by jfriedman, under
Community Art.
The latest issue of the Dallas-based humanities quarterly is dedicated to the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Atheneum—the 12-acre UT Dallas campus art district designed by iconic architecture firm Morphosis. I contributed an article “Why we Need the Athenaeum” in which I argue that the Athenaeum model of public spaces is exactly what our culture […]
