Pendant paintings are companion paintings that should hang on a wall together. Two of my favorite are of a married couple by Frans Halls, whose separate treatments might seem sexist at first sight [Fig. 1-2].

She is demure, highly finished, hemmed in by a fashionable ruff and bonnet, perhaps on the...

In memory of a talented young teacher and rapper, Nes Wordz, featuring an excerpt from his rendition of the Homeric encounter between Odysseus and Polyphemus.  

In the literary market, there is a preference for narrative over analysis that provides plenty of anecdotal evidence but little understanding. 

I wish to talk today about the poetry and suicide of my friend, a great Russian poet and artist Anya Al’chuk, in Berlin in March 2008. To put it up front: can a suicide be an act of militancy, of militant aesthetics?

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).

It's been a while since I posted to Arcade.  So many deadlines!  Several times a day I find myself mumbling, "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." 

"The art world, which used to be a community, is now part of the world wide visual culture industry, which includes film, fashion, television, and advertising, and works overtime to trample down the boundaries that used to keep them separate."

In my last post, I discussed the unfortunate marriage of Emily Dickinson's poems to "The Yellow Rose of Texas."  This post and its successor turn to an equally unlikely pairing of poem and music that produced an extraordinarily serendipitous outcome, one that ought to lead to a recording contract for one of my students.  Before I get there, I'd like to provide a little background.

I'll admit it. I get off on death. Skeletons. X'd eyes. No, not the phenomenon itself, but certainly the aftermath -- the way it makes you consider what comes ahead and what came before. It's not a kink but a forced form of contemplation.