Category: Essay
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John Galliano: The Theatre And The Ruin
The cancelled Metropolitan Museum retrospective has reopened one of fashion’s most difficult questions: what should history do with an artist whose creative achievement is inseparable from an act of profound disgrace? By Bergotte The Metropolitan Museum of Art did not merely cancel an exhibition when it abandoned John Galliano: Horizons, the major retrospective that had…
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Peter Pennoyer
Makers & Rooms — Essay V The Classical Present Peter Pennoyer builds in the tradition of McKim, Mead and White and sees nothing remotely conservative about it. In an architectural culture that treats ornament as embarrassment and history as weakness, he has spent thirty years making the case that the classical orders are not a…
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What’s So Special About Mulatu Astatke
By Bergotte Mulatu Astatke went to music school in London, studied jazz in Boston, played vibraphone in New York, and then went home to Ethiopia and made something that had never existed before. He took the pentatonic scales and ancient modal structures of Ethiopian music — a tradition reaching back centuries, untouched by the Western…
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The Cult of More
I think about this a lot…by Bergotte Greed, Consumption and the Failure of Enough Late capitalism has produced one of the strangest societies in history: we have more of almost everything and yet live inside a permanent rhetoric of lack. We have too many clothes, too much furniture, too much technology, too much food, too…
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Thrown Into the Open: Who We Are According to Martin Heidegger
He asked the most fundamental question in the history of philosophy — what does it mean to be? — with a depth and a rigour that nobody before him had quite managed. He was also a member of the Nazi party who never adequately recanted. Both of these things are true, and the essay that…
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Nan Goldin
Encounters · No. 5 The Ballad Nan Goldin spent decades photographing the people she loved — in bed, in bars, in hospital, in death. Then she turned the same unflinching attention on the family that had helped kill them. By Bergotte There is a photograph taken in 1984 that Nan Goldin has described as the…
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Art in the Wake of September 11
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 blue…
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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 way…
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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 a…
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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.
