An elegant man must never be completely elegant. There’s no man more inelegant than a despot power is always tacky. There’s no elegant way to invade, pillage, and kill. Nothing’s tackier than a uniform. Nothing’s tackier than a toga.
“The works reveal a structured imprint of the everyday, in the exploration of the relationship of media to the psycho-geographical, social, and political nature of place. Adler Guerrier sets drawing, collage, sculpture, photo, video, and installation in dialogue. His inspired cultural hybrid between color and plane are anchored by fearless, site-specific subversions of place and time in regards to conceptions of race, class, and culture. Often calling upon the districts of Miami and his own backyard, Guerrier examines the contemporary flaneur in an impending post-demographic age.”
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
—A Virtual Book Launch : Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University), Monica Azzolini (University of Bologna), and Stephen Campbell (Johns Hopkins University). Apr 03, 2026, 12:00pm–1:00pm.
“In the late medieval and early modern periods, European artists, theorists, and natural philosophers imagined Nature not simply as a force of reproduction but as an artist in its own right—a creative power capable of generating images, artifacts, and objects of beauty.”
“he would come to exemplify a new kind of criticism, aimed at an audience of literate laypeople and marked by the application of left-wing political thought to the analysis of both high and popular culture, from Marx to Mickey Mouse.
Before the late eighteenth century, few would think to write an essay unpacking the hidden meaning of a novel or painting, let alone suggest that works of art might have ideological agendas or biases. Art was good if it was well executed and managed to entertain without being coarse, immoral, or sacrilegious. As Benjamin argued in his dissertation, it was writers such as Friedrich Schlegel who, around 1800, first began to consider aesthetic objects as capacious and mercurial entities, whose true contents could be revealed only through sustained scrutiny. For them, an art work became a “medium of reflection,” no longer simply a mirror of the world but a tool for understanding things about history, society, and politics, as well as about more familiar matters of the human heart. As for criticism, it was both a means to discover what the art object had to say and an extension of the object itself.”
“In 1928, he published “One-Way Street,” a collection of aphoristic meditations on objects such as gloves (“All disgust is originally disgust at touching”) and numbered lists of epigrams (“I. Books and harlots can be taken to bed. II. Books and harlots interweave time”). Elliptical and fragmentary, “One-Way Street” is, Benjamin said, an homage to the “inconspicuous forms” of urban life taken in by the flâneur, the man who strolls aimlessly about a city covered with “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” whose pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal style Benjamin borrowed as his own.”
That [science] which treats of those conditions of knowledge which lie in the nature, not of thought itself, but of that which we think about?…?has been called?…?Architectonic, in so far as it treats of the method of building up our observations into system. —Sir William Hamilton
i must be careful about such things as these. the thin-grained oak. the quiet grizzlies scared into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing in behind them closer in the snow. the snared rigidity of the winter lake. deer after deer crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare with their eyes pressed to the ice. in a sleep. hearing the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear in the high quiet. i must be careful not to shake anything in too wild an elation. not to jar the fragile mountains against the paper far- ness. nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air. of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious words. like rocks. without one snowcapped mistake.
