Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, the attacks remain curiously difficult to assimilate into the history of art. This is not because they lacked images. Quite the opposite. Few historical events have been so comprehensively photographed, televised, replayed and digitally circulated. The second aircraft entering the South Tower, the towers burning against an unnaturally blueContinue reading “Art in the Wake of September 11”
Category Archives: Essay
The Reel Argument: Maurice Pialat
By Bergotte Maurice Pialat is the best French filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century that most people outside France have never seen, and the neglect is one of those quiet scandals that film culture periodically allows to accumulate without anyone taking responsibility for correcting it. He made films about love the wayContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Maurice Pialat”
The Human Condition According to Edith Wharton
By Bergotte Edith Wharton understood that society is not the backdrop to human life but its substance — that the codes, rituals, and unspoken laws through which a community organises itself are not superficial constraints on some deeper, freer self but the very medium in which selfhood is formed, expressed, and destroyed. This is aContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Edith Wharton”
Slow Down Or Die: The Economics of Degrowth
Timothée Parrique’s Slow Down or Die asks us to abandon economic growth as civilisation’s governing purpose—and replace it with sufficiency, equality, care and democratic control.
Zaha Hadid
The Architecture of Impossible Things Zaha Hadid spent sixteen years designing buildings that could not be built. When the technology finally caught up with her imagination, she remade the skyline of the world. The question she never stopped arguing about was whether any of it was actually for the people inside. By Bergotte There isContinue reading “Zaha Hadid”
What’s So Special About Laura Nyro
By Bergotte Laura Nyro wrote some of the most commercially successful songs of the late 1960s. She also made some of the least commercially successful records of that era — records so strange, so emotionally extreme, so structurally unwilling to behave, that the music industry dealt with her the way a mining company deals withContinue reading “What’s So Special About Laura Nyro”
The Ocean and the Wave: Who We Are According to Baruch Spinoza
He was excommunicated at twenty-three by the Jewish community that raised him, in terms so severe that no record of the reason survives. He spent the rest of his life grinding lenses and thinking, alone, in a sequence of Dutch boarding houses. What he produced was the most complete and most radical philosophical system inContinue reading “The Ocean and the Wave: Who We Are According to Baruch Spinoza”
Balthus
Encounters · No. 4 The Count of Nowhere Balthus was one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and the author of images that remain genuinely, irreducibly disturbing. Both of these things are true. The difficulty is that they cannot be separated. By Bergotte Toward the end of his life, Balthus lived in aContinue reading “Balthus”
Gloria Steinem, 1934–2026: The Long Work of Freedom
The journalist, organiser and public intellectual helped make women’s private lives legible as political facts—and equality a measure of civilisation itself.
The Reel Argument: John Cassavetes
By Bergotte Before John Cassavetes, American cinema had a settled understanding of what feelings were for: they were the fuel that drove stories toward resolution. After Cassavetes, a different possibility existed — the possibility that feeling itself was the subject, that the camera could be pointed at a human being in the grip of emotionContinue reading “The Reel Argument: John Cassavetes”
My World of Interiors 