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Art, Class and Cleavage

“Attention all socialists and left-thinking people of the Earth. And all you left-sided, critical (down to your last unpierced body part) poststructuralist radicals. Punks and drum-and-bass heads too, listen: Ben Watson has a message for you. Art, Class and Cleavage proposes a negative dialectics intoxicated with the excesses . . .” read more

Embracing the Enterprise Culture: Art Insitutions since the 1980s

“With the Government giving less to art and education,somebody’s got to give more. And that somebody is America’s corporations.” read more

Radical Art at documenta X

“documenta X was an extraordinary event. From June to September last year, the exhibition mounted a fearless challenge to today’s general premise and practice of art, and indeed to the entire art and culture industry. The tenth documenta awaits—and deserves—a sea-change in the predominantly negative responses it . . .” read more

The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation

“I want to think aloud today about a fundamental theoretical problem—the relationship between urbanism and architecture—which, alongside its own intrinsic interest and urgency, raises a number of theoretical issues of significance to me, although not necessarily to all of you. But I need to ask for some provisional . . .” read more

Tolerating Impurities: On Ontology, Genalogy and Defence of Philistinism

“I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt or mustard...there was much talk about purity, and I had begun to be proud of being impure. Primo Levi” read more

Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection

“Children, it seems, find it hard to understand the ontological status of stuffed animals: ‘is it alive or is it dead?’ Mortality is of course one of art’s traditional Big Subjects, coolly invoked and illustrated in Damien Hirst’s famous work The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of . . .” read more

Cinematic Ethnology: Siegfried Kracauer’s 'The White Collar Masses'

“In the Introduction to his last, posthumously published book History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), Siegfried Kracauer formulates a summa of his intellectual existence. The discovery of the hidden connection between his interest in history and his interest in the photographic media reveals to him the . . .” read more

The Multiple Identities of Walter Benjamin

“In the August issue of Biography, a popular us magazine, the editor-in-chief prefaces some musing on that month’s star profiles, General George C. Marshall and Tina Turner, with an outline of the magazine’s core philosophy: ‘No two life stories are even remotely the same, even the ones . . .” read more

Against Voluptuous Bodies: Of Satiation Without Happiness

“In their nlr article, ‘Spectres of the Aesthetic’, Dave Beech and John Roberts critique what they call ‘the new aestheticism’, identifying my book The Fate of Art as providing the philosophical articulation of a movement which they suggest includes the writings of Andrew Bowie, Terry Eagleton, Fredric . . .” read more

Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism

“Those who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism, are well aware of the key role played by the notion of the ‘typical’: truly progressive literature should depict ‘typical heroes in typical situations.’ Writers who presented a bleak picture of Soviet reality were not simply accused . . .” read more

Confessions of a 'New Aeshete': A Response to the 'New Philistines'

“Pausing to allow the waves of sound of the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony to ebb away, I return to the delights of my glass of Californian Chardonnay and reflect on the way Dimitri Mitropoulos’s interpretation of the symphony steers the vital course between long-term structure, sudden . . .” read more

Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism

“Black-and-white photographs of a vast pit, its sides cut into a giant’s stairway and scaled by crude ladders, its surface covered with figures, most bearing large sacks; scanning the space between foreground and distant background, the effect is dizzying—there must be thousands of these figures. The pictures are . . .” read more

Captured by the Screen

“With every chapter, Gargantua serves up a concentrated dose of commodity images, most of these glossy and seen on a screen. Under Stallabrass’s direction, the commonplace artefacts of our daily lives impose themselves like actors in a technological drama. The computer screen perched on desk or lap, captures . . .” read more

Cold Eye

“What appear to be a sequence of old snapshots in faded colour have been framed and hung on the gallery wall. They look as if they had been dug from some forgotten trunk in a family home, yet they show only backgrounds—walls, garden lawns, a deserted tea-table, an . . .” read more

The Ecstasy of Philistinism

“Believing that philistinism was not mere vulgarity but ‘the antithesis par excellence of aesthetic behaviour’, Adorno expressed interest in studying the phenomenon as a via negativa to the aesthetic. But the project remained unrealized, and although he frequently made dismissive or insulting remarks about philistines, Adorno never bothered . . .” read more

Spectres of the Aesthetic

“Questions on art which were once seen as overloaded with liberal sentiment are now being taken seriously by the philosophical Left in the English-speaking world. At the heart of this swirl of revision and revival, art is being employed by aesthetic discourse to re-examine questions of subjectivity, judgement, . . .” read more

In and Out of Love with Damien Hirst

“On weekends at the Tate Gallery, long queues of pretty young, pretty cool people would form before two tall glass cases arranged to make a narrow corridor. Each case contained one half of a cow which had been split lengthways from nose to tail, and the queue was . . .” read more

Gramsci, Bakhtin and the Semiotics of Hegemony

“Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin were very different types of thinkers. While the former spent the 1920s maximally involved in the Italian revolutionary movement as leader of the Communist Party, the latter, living in Petrograd at the time of the revolution and throughout the second half of the . . .” read more

Remarks on the Spectacle

“‘The society of the spectacle’ is a phrase that has passed, in France, and I suppose elsewhere, into common parlance. The recent death of Guy Debord has had a share in giving to his work of 1967, and to the Situationist trend of the sixties, a reputation as . . .” read more

The Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics

“Two generations after McCarthyism, the Hollywood Left has almost receded from living memory. Its principal figures now show up mainly in the obituary columns of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, their experiences with the blacklist reduced to a sentence or deleted entirely. The most politically . . .” read more

Empowering Technology: The Exploration of Cyberspace

“The face of Thomas Paine, rendered in yellow and pink, graces the cover of the first British edition of Wired, a successful magazine from the United States devoted to proselytizing the benefits of computer networking. For the technophile devotees of this subject, it is far more than a . . .” read more

The Rhetoric of Urban Space

“Is there still a living choice between Necropolis and Utopia: the possibility of building a new kind of city that will, freed of inner contradictions, positively enrich and further human development? (Lewis Mumford)” read more

Success and Failure of Peter Fuller

“The British have not been well served by their most popular critics of modern art. Their specious prose and philosophical posturing often masked confused, contradictory thought, producing a writing that was both patronizing and mystifying. They tended to be isolated by an atmosphere of philistine hostility which rarely . . .” read more

Vision and Totality

“In the epilogue to Marxism and Totality, Martin Jay remarked that ‘if one had to find a common denominator among the major figures normally included in the post-structuralist category—Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers and their comrades avant . . .” read more

Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch

“Years ago, Denis de Rougement published a study entitled Twenty-eight Centuries of Europe; here, readers will only find five of them, the most recent. The idea is that the sixteenth century acts as a double watershed—against the past, and against other continents—after which European literature develops that formal . . .” read more

Scavenging by Night

“How art confronts industrial capitalism and its directors, the bourgeoisie, has troubled the modern Western world ever since Théophile Gautier acted as cheerleader on the first night of Victor Hugo’s Ernani in 1830, causing a riot. Then, the fight was between the Romantics and the classicists, but from . . .” read more

Reply to John Newsinger

“Over the past decade, I must have read yards of stuff, much of it penned by wised-up radicals, about the decay of authorship. The writer, we are often instructed, barely matters at all. His or her intentions and desires are an obstacle to a close reading or a . . .” read more

An Episode in the Larkin Wars

“Christopher Hitchens’ article on ‘Larkin and “Sensitivity” ’ in nlr 200 is as energetic an exercise in sectarian bile as I have seen on the Left in recent years. My seven-page review of Larkin’s Selected Letters that appeared in the journal Race and Class seems to have . . .” read more

From Courtly Love to 'The Crying Game'

“Why speak about courtly love (amour courtois) today, in the age of permissiveness, when sexual encounter is often nothing more than a ‘quickie’ in some dark corner of an office?The impression that courtly love is something out of date, long superseded by modern manners, is a lure which . . .” read more

A Quartet for Our Times

“In 1992, music suffered the loss of three of the most outstanding composers of our century, the Frenchman Olivier Messiaen, the American John Cage, and the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla. In these three figures, who all lived long and richly productive lives, can be found important clues about the . . .” read more

Anti-Hegemony: The Legacy of William Blake

“This has been a long, and perhaps strange, way into William Blake. On one matter I am impenitent. Blake can’t have dreamed up a whole vocabulary of symbolism, which touches at so many points the traditions which I have discussed, for himself ab novo. Nor can he have . . .” read more

Something About the Poetry: Larkin and 'Sensitivity'

“To Julian Barnes, on 27 September 1985, Philip Larkin wrote concerning an encounter with almost the only woman he ever admitted to ‘adoring’:” read more

Messages in a Bottle

“Key people.—The self-important type who only thinks himself something when confirmed by the role he plays in collectives which are none, existing merely for the sake of collectivity; the delegate with the armband; the rapt speechmaker spicing his address with wholesome wit and prefacing his concluding remark . . .” read more

Literature and Market Realism

“These are strange times. Capitalism, crippled by its own contradictions—there are thirty million people out of work in the oecd countries alone—is nonetheless triumphant. From New York to Beijing, via Moscow and Vladivostok, you can eat the same junk food, watch the same junk on television and, . . .” read more

Pearls and Swine: Intellectuals and the Media

“For those of us in the academy who have been urging people for twenty years or more to take popular culture seriously, Jim McGuigan’s Cultural Populism is a sombre read. A lucid account of how cultural studies took their place in the university curriculum, it pinpoints the ways . . .” read more

Just Gaming: Allegory and Economy in Computer Games

“‘We need a leader. We have many missions to complete. We have to assassinate leaders of our aggressors, we have to destroy heavily guarded installations. We have many enemies, and they are not all human. We need to cross alien landscapes, over rocky surfaces, through vast subterranean caverns . . .” read more

The Crisis of Contemporary Culture

“St Catherine’s, the college to which I have just migrated, got its name by a mistake. The college began life in the nineteenth century as a society for matriculating students too poor to gain entry to the University, which is not least of the reasons why I am . . .” read more

The Ideology of the Aesthetic

“In Ingmar Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute, the camera, throughout the overture, traverses the faces of an audience divided by age, sex, ethnicity and style, but united in its common rapture. It is a compelling image of the power of the ‘aesthetic’ to realize—despite everything that tends . . .” read more

Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological Category

“We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and sensation of Time.” read more

The Invisible Flaneur

“The relationship of women to cities has long preoccupied reformers and philanthropists. In recent years the preoccupation has been inverted: the Victorian determination to control working-class women has been replaced by a feminist concern for women’s safety and comfort in city streets. But whether women are seen as . . .” read more

It’s Sooner Than You Think, or Where Are We in the History of Rock Music?

“That don’t mean shit! We’re here, and right now!” read more

Autographs and Images: Snapshots of Berlin and Prague

“The changing visual environment of formerly Communist countries, in flux under the pressures of capitalist enterprise and economic chaos, is so provisional, its elements apparently so unwarranted, that it raises many questions in the mind of any visitor from the West. This essay is about some of those . . .” read more

Subcultures and Society

“In their Foreword to Political Shakespeare Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield give a brief account of ‘cultural materialism’: a mode of critical analysis which examines both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ texts, insists on their implication in history, denies that they have any transcendent meanings, and takes its stand on . . .” read more

A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman

“When I was in school I was getting disgusted with the attitude of art being so religious or sacred, so I wanted to make something which people could relate to without having read a book about it first. So that anybody off the street could appreciate it, even . . .” read more

The Place of Theory

“Readers not yet familiar with Fredric Jameson’s corpus will find this collection of his theoretical essays a useful introduction to the major themes and methods that have dominated his work for two decades. From the groundbreaking programmatic text, ‘Metacommentary’ (1971), to his more recent writings on postmodernism (represented . . .” read more

Postmodernism, Subjectivity and the Question of Value

“Within the circles influenced by and sympathetic to postmodernism there has of late been discussion as to how long an engagement with traditional criteria of truth and value can be deferred. It has been suggested that the eclecticism and relativist logic of postmodernism is inherently self-stultifying—or at least . . .” read more

Scenes from the Future: Komar & Melamid

“‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Gramsci’s famous dictum, written in his prison notebook in 1930, seems to describe two apparently disparate situations—the Soviet Union, plunged . . .” read more

Aporias of Modern Aesthetics

“A garden gnome is no longer a garden gnome. This is the dilemma facing contemporary art, that is circumscribed by the unhappy concept of post-modernity. Up until a certain moment (let us take 1969, the year of Adorno’s death, as a marker) a garden gnome was still a . . .” read more

The Idea of the Primitive: British Art and Anthropology 1918-1930

“The idea of the primitive has long been a potent and highly influential current in British thought and history. In particular, the period 1918–30 saw primitivism established as an important theme in writing on art and anthropology. Analysis of the concept may therefore usefully begin there—with a span . . .” read more

America: Post-Modernity?

“Fredric Jameson understands the presence of [the] sedimented historical tradition when he argues that all works of popular culture have utopian dimensions that enable them to critique contemporary power relations. But even Jameson relegates the historical work of popular culture to a ‘political unconscious’, an uncomprehending desire to . . .” read more