Re-reading “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin Part Two “What is aura actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. Decades after the...
WALTER BENJAMIN (1892 -1940) Life and Work: Part Two Working for German publications, Walter Benjamin earned enough money to spend some months in Paris where, in 1927, he began his famous and unfinished Arcades Project. As one would imagine, he and his wife Dora...
WALTER BENJAMIN (1892 -1940) Life and Work: Part One Like many Jewish intellectuals in Germany, Walter Benjamin considered himself “German”. His family was privileged and fully assimilated into the larger German society. It would be this stratum of German society...
SURREALISM AND ITS OBJECTS ART BECOMES FETISH Surrealism was initially practiced in written form as textual production, as a means of freeing the literary mind from “writerly” conventions. Just as Sigmund Freud took dictation, so to speak, writing down what his...
Clement Greenberg and Modernist Aesthetics Clement Greenberg was a rare character in history: the right person in the right place at the right time, writing the right things to the right people. A New York intellectual and art critic, Greenberg was uniquely positioned...
THE CUBISTS AND THEIR CIRCLE Today Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) are considered to be the “True Cubists,” to borrow a phrase from art historian, Edward Fry. But at the time Cubism was famous or infamous with the Parisian public,...
