Desiring Machines and Eternal Refusals
The Museum of Modern Art opened a major Marcel Duchamp retrospective (April 12‑August 22, 2026), foregrounding his iconic Large Glass and early Cubist‑Futurist works. The show underscores Duchamp’s pivot to readymades, a move that seeded a multibillion‑dollar conceptual‑art market. The essay highlights Maurizio Cattelan’s banana sculpture, which fetched $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in 2024, as a contemporary echo of Duchamp’s anti‑art provocations. It argues that Duchamp’s legacy continues to shape how art is valued, critiqued, and weaponized in today’s cultural‑political climate.
A Happy Thought for a Dark Time
The essay juxtaposes Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism, which treats consciousness as the fundamental ontological substrate, with Bernard Stiegler’s continental view that consciousness emerges from a technical and social ambience. It traces the historic split between analytic and continental traditions, highlighting...
Israel's War in Lebanon
Israel’s Air Force launched Operation Eternal Darkness, deploying 50 fighter jets that dropped 160 bombs on 100 targets across Lebanon, killing at least 254 civilians in a single day. The assault, the largest concentrated aerial strike since 1983, is part...
Do We Create Our Reality?
Recent discourse questions whether individual thoughts create reality, juxtaposing New Age claims with sociological critiques. The essay argues that while consciousness underlies existence, social structures, institutions, and cultural narratives largely shape personal psychology and behavior. It cites Hannah Arendt and Murray Bookchin to...
The Selling of the Counterculture
The Christie’s auction of Jack Kerouac’s original "On the Road" scroll fetched over $12 million, turning a Beat Generation relic into a luxury collectible. This sale underscores a wider pattern of 1950s‑60s countercultural artifacts being absorbed by the high‑end art market....
The Disaster Is the System
The essay revisits Maurice Blanchot’s 1980 treatise “The Writing of the Disaster” to argue that contemporary catastrophes—from Gaza bombings to mass deportations—are not anomalies but manifestations of a totalizing “System” that absorbs and normalizes violence. Blanchot’s notion of disaster as...