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Feeling Very Fine: Picasso the Printmaker at the British Museum
This is Pablo Picasso the way he is rarely seen – at least in so far as the hundred or so pieces at the British Museum’s Picasso: Printmaker have been displayed. The viewer is treated to dazzling marked draughtsmanship that also evinces a mastery of techniques: the use of drypoint and etching, lithographs, linocuts and […]
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The Collective Creativity of Workers, Part II
Orientation Summing up Part I My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from […]
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The Collective Creativity of Workers
Orientation One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most […]
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The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations
Orientation Power struggles between the two sides of the brain In Part I of this article, I compared the left to the right side of the brain across many categories. One of the most interesting prospects in Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Master and His Emissary, is that the two sides of the brain functions […]
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The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations
Orientation Left and right brain divisions and dependencies Why is the brain so clearly and deeply divided? Why are the two cerebral hemispheres asymmetrical? Is the division of labor in the brain complete or do the sides overlap in functions? A lot of what we once thought went on in one hemisphere alone is now […]
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The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus
photo by Jeanne Lemlin To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly. It was a common form of execution in the ancient world. It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians. In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and […]
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Degenerate Art in New Normal Germany
One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists […]
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The Rise of the New Culture Commissars
The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities […]
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Sick, and Sick of It All
Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their […]
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The 2024 Oscars: The Rise of the New Culture Commissars
The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities […]
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