Category Archives: Art

Arthur Jafa

Essay · Art & Ideas The Question He Has Been Asking for Thirty Years Arthur Jafa has organised his entire artistic life around a single question: how do you make a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music? The question sounds like a problem of aesthetics. It is, in fact, aContinue reading “Arthur Jafa”

Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There

She has been a clown, a centrefold, a society matron, a fairy-tale victim, a film noir ingénue, a Renaissance duchess, a party guest, a disaster. She has never, in fifty years of making photographs, been herself. This is not evasion. It is the most radical position in contemporary art. By Bergotte There is no portraitContinue reading “Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There”

Albert King

Essay · Music & Lives The Velvet Bulldozer Albert King was six feet four inches tall and played a right-handed guitar upside down and left-handed, without a pick, bending strings that were already fighting him — strung the wrong way, the tension reversed, producing a sound so specific and so irreducible that no one whoContinue reading “Albert King”

Frank Bowling

Essay · Art & Lives The Painter Who Crossed Every Ocean Frank Bowling arrived in London from British Guiana in 1953 with no art education and a desire to be a poet, and became, across the following seven decades, one of the most significant painters working in the English language — a phrase that wouldContinue reading “Frank Bowling”

Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness

He arrived in New York with a ukulele and a stammer and an idea that pop music could be the vehicle for the most serious questions a person could ask. Fifty years later, the former lead singer of Talking Heads remains the most restlessly curious, most formally inventive, most genuinely odd figure in American popularContinue reading “Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness”

Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument

He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is noContinue reading “Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument”

Courtney Love

Essay  ·  Music & Culture The Mess That Was Also the Method Courtney Love arrived in the early 1990s indie scene like something the scene had not known it was missing: a woman who wanted to be enormous, who was not prepared to be grateful for whatever space was made available to her, and whoContinue reading “Courtney Love”

The Architecture of Fear: Louise Bourgeois and the Art of Survival

She spent seventy years making art about her childhood. She became famous at seventy-one. She worked until the day she died at ninety-eight. Louise Bourgeois was not the most famous artist of the twentieth century, but she may have been the bravest — and the most honest about what art is actually for. By BergotteContinue reading “The Architecture of Fear: Louise Bourgeois and the Art of Survival”

The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America

America has often sung what it could not admit in speech. Its songs have carried grief before the law recognised suffering, desire before society permitted freedom, rage before politics found language, and longing before the country had earned the ideals it claimed for itself. If the American novel is a courtroom of conscience, and AmericanContinue reading “The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America”