User account

Art

Punk’s raptures are mystical.
Punk’s raptures are mystical.

Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

Philology often seems concerned with tracing origins and identifying true sources as a way of sweeping away the penumbrae of cultural ornamentation and exfoliating the accumulated dead skin of the past that hardens into decadence, at once institutional and intellectual. Its spirit is Lutheran, or Nietzschean, which amounts to the same thing when you think about it a little. So can it be with punk, which is usually reduced to a series of flattened clichés about bondage trousers, dyed hair...
ABO

 

Topics

 

Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer
Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer, Philippe Despoix (ed.), ...

The Past's Threshold

There can be no doubt, however, that in Kracauer’s texts published at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s from his position as an editor of the cultural pages at the daily newspaper Frankfurter ­Zeitung, then in the 1950s during his American period, he sketches out a theorisation of photography that can be described as groundbreaking. But it is also true that most of his works overlap, in more than one way, with this medium of reproduction or that...
  • media theory
  • film
  • Siegfried Kracauer
  • History of photography
  • photography
Current Texts
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • documenta
  • propaganda
  • concentration camp
  • National Socialism
  • Poland
  • gift
  • contemporary art
  • ethics
  • migration
  • political aesthetics
Current Texts

Sandra Frimmel

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma of the series: a (large) part of the artistically trained viewers see these shorthand works as abstract forms, without understanding the text, and only the few who can read (Russian) shorthand perceive a text, which for them doesn’t necessarily have to be art. I Hate the Avant-Garde was created in 2017, after a sketch made in 1987 in reaction to a changed situation in the reception of nonconformist art. With the beginning of perestroika, unofficial art that had hitherto been excluded from the state-run art scene—that is, from the official infrastructure of museums and exhibition spaces, and from art scholarship...

ABO DE
  • writing
  • democracy
  • avant-garde