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From AIDS to Corona, Silence=Death

In his book The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, American art critic Hal Foster writes that it is trauma that allows us to escape from the traditional binary approach that plagued most postwar art: that images either refer to something or...

The Dangerous Lesson of Whiplash — And Why I Hated It

My feelings about Whiplash are complex, but one feeling isn’t. I hated it. I hated it with a passion. If I had seen it in theaters, I would have walked out. And here’s why: Whiplash glorifies a specific aspect of the artistic process — the grueling,...

How Alive Are You Willing To Be?

To paraphrase something I read recently by Anne Lamott: Have you asked yourself lately, “How alive am I willing to be?” “It’s time to get serious about joy and fulfillment,” she writes, “work on our books, songs, dances, gardens....

On HBO’s Girls and Hannah and Why She Matters

I am one episode away from finishing season 3 of Girls.To be honest, I have not been a huge fan of this season, until recently. The first half of the season seemed to lack the mastery that seasons 1 and 2 oozed. There was a floundering, a lack of intentionality and...

An Artist’s Manifesto

Being an artist requires an excessive amount of confidence. Some might even say ego. Because who else is foolish enough to create something out of nothing? Who else is foolish enough to create something out of nothing and believe that it matters — that somehow...