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The Original, Anahid Nersessian on “Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,” Peter E. Gordon (newyorker)

“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.”

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John Duff, Reena Spaulings. January 18 – February 28, 2026; TEXT+LIST OF WORKS.

John Duff
Untitled, 1968
clamshells, wire, paint
dimensions variable, 106.68 x 63.5 x 38.1 cm; 42 x 25 x 15 in
JD/S 48

“He thinks, dreams, puts his hand to this or that, and we are welcome to eavesdrop if we care to do so.” via New York Art Critics Association