Modernism

Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2013 IN ONE OF THE NOTEBOOKS he kept between 1914 and 1916, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “the work of art is the object seen from the point of view of eternity; and the good life is the world seen from the point of view of eternity. This is the connection between art and ethics.” It is not hard to understand, Wittgenstein’s enthusiasm to serve in the Austrian army notwithstanding, how the experience of civilization-destroying war would open up the question of eternity, of how distant a perspective we need to be able to see the ways and things of our world as redeemable, or even as worthy of redemption. [Read More]

A panel discussion organized by the Platypus Affiliated Society on February 7, 2013 at New York University. Video Recording Panelists Peter Eisenman is design principal of Eisenman Architects in New York. His current projects include the City of Culture of Galicia in Spain; a master plan for Pozzuoli, Italy, and a residential condominium in Milan. His award-winning projects include the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Ohio. [Read More]

ON SEPTEMBER 21, 2012, Chris Mansour interviewed Ste­phen Eric Bronner, a professor at Rutgers University and author of Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times (1980), Socialism Unbound (1990), Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (1994), and Reclaiming the En­lightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (2004), among many others. His most recent book is Mod­ernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, and Uto­pia. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. [Read More]

On February 11, 2011 – the day Hosni Mubarak resigned the office of President of Egypt – Chris Mansour interviewed Susan Buck-Morss, professor of political philosophy and social theory at Cornell University and author of The Origin of Negative Dialectics and Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, on behalf of The Platypus Review. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Chris Mansour: What were the stakes of introducing Critical Theory into a postmodern culture that widely considered its ideas obsolete? [Read More]

_HAL FOSTER IS a prominent critic and art historian who contributes regularly to Artforum, New Left Review*, and The Nation. He is also an editor of October. In the fall of 2009, he sent out a questionnaire to 70 critics and curators, asking them what “contemporary” means today. Foster notes that the term “contemporary” is not new, but that “What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. [Read More]

ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHT EXHIBITIONS of the summer of 2007 in Chicago was The Art Institute’s retrospective exhibition on the work of Jeff Wall. This occasion marked the first time that the Art Institute exhibited a solo show of a photographer. Jeff Wall’s large-scale color transparencies, mounted in light boxes, covered the same walls that have previously displayed Rembrandts, Girodets, and Manets. The exhibition provided the opportunity to reconsider the present condition of photography as art. [Read More]