Twenty years after her death, the great critic’s ideas about images, suffering, and the moral life feel less like history than like prophecy. By Bergotte There is a photograph that Susan Sontag never saw — or rather, she could not have seen it in the form we now encounter it, scrolling past it on aContinue reading “The Wound and the Camera: Susan Sontag and the Unfinished Project of Seeing”
Category Archives: Essay
The Human Condition According to Joseph Conrad
By Bergotte Joseph Conrad wrote about the darkness at the centre of things — not as a metaphor, not as a philosophical proposition to be argued and defended, but as a lived reality that his own extraordinary life had given him direct and repeated access to. He was a Polish nobleman who became a BritishContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Joseph Conrad”
Our Girl Marilyn at 100
By Bergotte Published June 1, 2026 — on the occasion of her hundredth birthday Marilyn Monroe was born one hundred years ago today, and she has never stopped being alive. Not alive in the way that the famous dead are alive — as a cultural reference, as a poster on a wall, as a costumeContinue reading “Our Girl Marilyn at 100”
Cady Noland
Encounters America Laid Bare Cady Noland made some of the most disturbing art of the late twentieth century from beer cans, shopping carts, silkscreened celebrity mugshots, and the hardware of American violence. Then she stopped. She has barely spoken since. The silence is part of the work. By Bergotte There is a work by CadyContinue reading “Cady Noland”
The Human Condition According to Valerie Solanas
By Bergotte Valerie Solanas is the writer this series was not supposed to include. She is not canonical. She is not comfortable. She wrote one major text, the SCUM Manifesto, which calls for the elimination of men, and she shot Andy Warhol in 1968, and she died alone in a welfare hotel in San FranciscoContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Valerie Solanas”
The Geometry of Roughness
How Benoit Mandelbrot’s outsider mathematics turned the broken, the jagged, and the cracked into a theory of the world A bug on a line printer The image, when it first appeared in the spring of 1980, looked like an accident. A staff researcher at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York,Continue reading “The Geometry of Roughness”
Peter Blake, Self-Portrait with Badges, 1961
Close Looking · One Painting Everything I Am Is on This Jacket In 1961, Peter Blake painted himself in a Chiswick garden holding an Elvis magazine, wearing Converse boots and a denim jacket covered in badges. The result is the most precise and most melancholy self-portrait in British art. It is also, accidentally, a portraitContinue reading “Peter Blake, Self-Portrait with Badges, 1961”
Living in Silence
Makers & Rooms Ivan Van Mossevelde built a house of raw concrete in the Flemish countryside in 1972 for an art collector who filled it with Judd and Sol LeWitt. Decades later, a young architect spotted it through the trees during a walk, was refused entry, and spent years waiting for it to come toContinue reading “Living in Silence”
In Times of Dragons: Tori Amos and the Mythology of Now
By Bergotte The opening line of Tori Amos’s eighteenth studio album is a command: “Shush yourself, down now.” It comes from the album’s antagonist — the “sadistic billionaire Lizard Demon husband” from whose penthouse the album’s protagonist is fleeing — and it is the most precisely chosen opening gambit she has made since the firstContinue reading “In Times of Dragons: Tori Amos and the Mythology of Now”
The Voice That Didn’t Live to Hear the Echo
Venice · Art · 2026 The 61st Venice Art Biennale opens on May 9th under the title In Minor Keys. Its curator, Koyo Kouoh, died a year ago. The show goes forward entirely as she conceived it — and it may be the most important Biennale in a generation. By Bergotte · Preview, May 2026Continue reading “The Voice That Didn’t Live to Hear the Echo”
My World of Interiors 