What Do Saints’ Bones and Duchamp’s Urinal Have in Common?
Why do art collectors pay millions of dollars for works that have no apparent material value? In a lengthy and rambling essay, Matthew Brown makes a persuasive case that the market for modern art can...
View ArticleDominance and Cuteness
From a review of Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting: Ngai positions cuteness as a particular kind of affective response to a lack of agency — in order to judge something...
View ArticleThe Shape of Our Buildings Shape Us
In the journal Anamnesis, Wilfred McClay has an insightful analysis of urbanism and its relationship to conservatism. McClay notes that during World War II the British House of Common was destroyed by...
View ArticleReligious Art for Nonbelievers
What can nonbelievers learn from religious art? Quite a lot, says Aaron Rosen in an article in The Humanist: This is not simply to say that all religious expressions are artistic. But what religious...
View ArticleIn Praise of Shortened Attention Spans
Terry Teachout explains why brevity can be a virtue in art: The latest alleged trend to set the world in a tizzy is the Crisis of Shorter Attention Spans, a dire development that has been brought about...
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