Side effects can turn a chain of events into a chart of obstacles, allies, and countercurrents where art provokes responses that no one would have anticipated. The effects can add up to social change, possibly for the good when art connects with accountability.

New hybrid forms demand new, expanded categories if they are to be accountably dealt with.

Artists in this exhibition responded to challenges of, and consolations of, sanctuary. Sanctuary, we learned, is not an abstraction; it is a relative term that we negotiate.

Literature creates what virtual reality tries to erase: the frame or boundary we fashion around the fabricated image that helps to better appreciate the real one. 

In his final film, the late Iranian director pushes the boundary between photography and film to its limit by breaking down the distinction between moment and duration. This reimagination of form would never have been possible without Kiarostami’s openness to digital techniques.

On the vital role of the arts and hermeneutics in the current political climate. 

What emerges when we look beyond the often self-assured cosmopolitan circulation of Americans abroad such as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler, is a larger identity construction that frequently performed cultural innocence. American artists, writers, and travelers sought to turn the liability of lacking a culture and tradition into the asset of allowing for unencumbered experience and being unaffected by the weight of history. In turn, notions of cultural innocence and belatedness that appear in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Franco-American exchange have resonances into the twentieth century, and even into the contemporary moment.

Michel Houellebecq is quite a character. The bad boy of French letters has made his name building post-humanist novels where dogs and clones are the rare creatures achieving a modicum of happiness.

Prudence Whittlesey is doing a series of paintings of philosophers and I sat for her before the show began. Her paintings of Jane Bennett and Graham Harman were incredible. She caught how Jane looks like she is on fire, and how there is vision coming out of Graham's eyes. Whittlesey is slated to do Badiou some time this week (I think).

...this is part of a talk I'm going to do at Queen Mary University in London in a few weeks, at the conference Emerging Critical Environments with Kate Soper and Tim Clark (and others). I already posted the opening on my blog.