Category: Art
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Yayoi Kusama
Encounters · No. 15 – This was written before Kusama’s passing, and originally scheduled for a November release. Due to current events, we have moved things around. You can read her obituary here. Infinity, One Dot at a Time Yayoi Kusama has been covering every surface she can reach with dots and nets and flowers…
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Sliman Mansour 1947-2026
Obituary He Painted Palestine from the Ground Up — Literally Sliman Mansour, 1947–2026. When the occupation cut off his art supplies, he turned to the earth beneath his feet. What he made from mud and henna and olive wood became the visual language of a people. By Bergotte · August 28, 2026 Sliman Mansour ·…
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Yayoi Kusama 1929-2026
Obituary She Painted to Stay Alive. She Stayed Alive for Ninety-Seven Years. Yayoi Kusama, 1929–2026. She covered the world in dots because the world was already covered in them and she was the only one honest enough to show it. By Bergotte · August 27, 2026 Yayoi Kusama · born March 22, 1929, Matsumoto, Japan…
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Carl Larsson
The House That Light Built Carl Larsson painted the same home, the same wife, the same children, hundreds of times. The result was not repetition. It was an argument — about beauty, about Sweden, about what a life is allowed to look like. There is a house in Sundborn, in the Swedish province of Dalarna,…
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Sophie Calle
Encounters · No. 1 The Art of Following Someone Sophie Calle has spent forty years turning other people’s lives — and her own grief — into something that looks, uncomfortably, like art. By Bergotte In January 1980, Sophie Calle followed a stranger to Venice. She had met him briefly at a party in Paris, not…
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Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of a Mother
Grief, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Maternal Love: Jørgen Vestergaard’s Historien om en moder (1977) By Bergotte The Story of a Mother Here is a film that is seared into my memory from childhood: Jørgen Vestergaard’s 1977 Danish stop-motion animated short Historien om en moder (The Story of a Mother) represents one of the most…
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Leonard Cohen & David Bowie
Two Ways of Dying in Public Leonard Cohen and David Bowie both knew they were dying when they made their final albums. Both kept the knowledge largely to themselves. Both produced, from that knowledge, work of extraordinary quality that addressed mortality directly and without evasion. And there the similarity ends — or rather, there the…
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Ovartaci
Essay · Art & Lives The Chief Loon and the World Inside the World Ovartaci lived for fifty-six years inside a psychiatric hospital in Risskov, near Aarhus, and made, in those fifty-six years, approximately a thousand works of extraordinary formal intelligence and phantasmagoric density — paintings, drawings, sculptures, mixed media pieces built from whatever materials…
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Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969
Essay · Music & History Four Days on Max Yasgur’s Farm Woodstock was not what it was advertised to be. It was not three days of peace and music — it was four days, the weather was frequently terrible, the organisation collapsed almost immediately, the food ran out, the sound system failed repeatedly, and at…
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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, a…
