“Our times have fallen out of tune with simplicity.”

Michael Golec on typographical modernity

Manjot Kaur’s work creates new stories for a new world and to animate humans to interact with non-humans in ways we have never imagined.

Vaishnavi Patil on artistic genealogies of mythology in South Asia and new tales for the modern world

Kher promotes more fluid conceptions of genealogy, encouraging viewers to consider that ancestry goes beyond the markers of culture, race, and ethnicity.

Vaishnavi Patil on Bharti Kher’s Ancestor and imaging motherhood

You're not taken to some other realm. You're firmly on the ground trying to perceive the eternal and transcendent in the immanent and present. That for me is an authentic kind of presence.

Arthur Aghajanian and Taylor Worley in conversation

Glorifying the apparently obvious becomes a way of warding off the transcendent, since distraction—made easier by friction-free, disembodied typographic banality—becomes the primary mode of attention.

Duncan Reyburn on mimetically uniform fonts

How does digital media emulate sacred imagery? How can the doctrine of Incarnation break the spell of hyperreality?

Arthur Aghajanian in conversation with Matthew Tan on a love that is also made manifest materially

What’s different about this idea, from either Claudel or Maritain, is that poetry does not call into being through naming: it finds.

Tom Break on Anna Key’s poetry and what art does

The possibility of an event, of perceiving a thing in the difficulty of what it is to be, of a momentary vision with an other-worldly value, is necessarily predicated on a certain degree of silence.

Tom Break on patience and contemplation

Something, outside of human reason, outside of human meaning and of human feeling, has reached him. “The bird sings.” And the speaker hears it.

Tom Break on hearing goodness in being

Every aspect of our existence is shot through with value, and it is inconceivable to think outside of this value-replete framework. So, how do we fit in an unmade world, in a world devoid of value?

Tom Break on art, value, and a meaningless world

If the loss of value is the affliction of our time, and if the recovery of value is going to be this serious and this painful, we will need to dig deep into the heart of the artistic enterprise to find the thing that has gone missing.

Tom Break on Simone Weil and the loss of value

Presentism is an obsession with the present that forgets its relationship with the past, that covers history and humanity with a blanket of generic sameness that muffles difference and dulls memory.

Donato Loia reviews Charles Saumarez Smith’s The Art Museum in Modern Times

It is no longer possible to ignore or undersell the impact that racialized and overtly white supremacist ideas have had on art history.

Christopher Nygren reviews Éric Michaud’s Barbarian Invasions

Like 15th Century portrait painters, we find ourselves amid an experimental period. It is unclear what the future will hold, whether it is standardized virtual bookshelves or targeted ads that suggest lipstick shades based on wall color.

Chloé Pelletier on the background to our Zoom backgrounds

This is something I can trust. Something I can give myself to, because in giving myself to it I don’t abandon my judgment, or foreswear my world. I set my eyes to work. I look into the painting. I look for how it shows itself to me. And I try to see what truth can be found there.

Tom Break on the hard road to truth.

Making oneself look at the painting becomes a forcible quieting of the mind. And because the work requires looking with attention, what you see, at the end of the looking, you see consciously.

Tom Break traces spiritual art from Abbot Suger to Ad Reinhardt.

Perhaps there’s another way of understanding what’s at issue in the western tradition—not a narrative but an ethos; not a straightforward story of development but an idea that resurges in the history of western art and reaches a kind of fever pitch in the modernist project.

Tom Break rethinks modern art’s relationship with the western art tradition

The windows at Conques, seen from the outside, seem to be walled with a metal sheet.

Donato Loia examines the old and the new with Pierre Soulages’s modernist windows in a Romanesque church.

For however emptied out a religious rite might appear, it still confirms that the unnamable experience of death has a place within the universe.

Donato Loia reflects on rituals of death in the modern world.

A pandemic forces us to confront one of the most important and essential religious problems: the problem of theodicy.

Donato Loia meditates on certainty, faith, and an empty St. Peter’s Square.