The Arts Archives - Page 5 of 38

Good Versions of the Right Film

2025’s summer blockbusters are, like those before them, oversized ploys for maximum profit. They’re still not big enough for Hollywood.

November 5, 2025 • by Amelia Nonemacher

At any point this summer, you could take refuge from the heat in one of the nation’s chain movie theaters and enjoy a good old summer blockbuster. Whether you chose to watch the “most authentic” racing movie ever made (F1); a heroic tale of human kindness triumphing over tech moguls-turned-arms-dealers ...

Literature

Shakespeare Among the French Romantics

One way to take the temperature of a society in crisis

October 30, 2025 • by Sophia Charles

In 1776, Voltaire penned a letter to the Académie Française. His subject was Shakespeare, his mood grim. He was responding to a new translation into French of the playwright’s work, still little known to France. In the context of the French Enlightenment, Shakespeare came as a shock. Instead of dramatizing nobility of ...

Democracy

Can Poetry Re-Enchant the Modern World?

The philosopher Charles Taylor goes hunting for cosmic connections

October 27, 2025 • by Sarah V. Schweig

When the protagonist of Miranda July’s recent novel, All Fours, plummets into a crisis, she realizes, at age 45, that she “had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us.” She had “only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time.” Being a writer, the character’s ...

Europe & Central Asia

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Katherine Kelaidis

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia ...

Interviews

Animated by Not Knowing

A conversation with Wendy Xu on thinking through poetry in Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

October 16, 2025 • by Gabriel Chavez and Wendy Xu

Poet and educator Wendy Xu’s new book, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire (University of Michigan Press, 2025), traverses multiple genres of poetry, poetry criticism, essay, and memoir, presenting close readings and “thinking-throughs” of works by poets such as Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean ...

Literature

Sisyphus, From Memory

An excerpt from Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

October 14, 2025 • by Wendy Xu

He was a god, or he wasn’t. He was a king, at least. He had some relation to both the gods on high, their glamour and power, and the lowly world of mortals. Of course you must imagine him with the stone, and it was a stone I’m sure, and ...

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Art & Design

Imperfect Images

Sohrab Hura on slowing down time in a survey show at MoMA PS1

October 2, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves and Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura began his career in film and photography documenting social issues across India and has been a full-time member of Magnum Photos since 2020. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include publishing, drawing, and writing in an ongoing investigation into the relationship between the personal and the ...

Activism

Looking Back on the Zapatistas’ Revolutionary Fashion

Liberation movements like the Zapatistas and the Black Panther Party teach us to unite political, artistic, and cultural ideas in how we dress

October 1, 2025 • by Mike Harrington

The so-called “first postmodern revolution,” the Zapatista uprising of 1994, came at a time when the internet was becoming a worldwide phenomenon. And with this Pandora’s box of widely accessible imagery and information newly opened, people were able to witness the uprising in more-or-less real time. Based in Chiapas, the southernmost ...

Looking Back on the Zapatistas’ Revolutionary Fashion

Film & Performing Arts

The Art of Change: A Libretto

Opera 0.2: A Prelude

September 18, 2025 • by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Chiara Bottici and Matteo Procuranti

Synopsis: A community decides to pursue its revolutionary dream by adopting the principle of accelerated change, and applies it to every aspect of social life. The result is a utopian (or dystopian) world that may (or may not) turn out to be ours. Event 1. Prologue Flutist in dialogue with video projections ...

Art & Design

A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

An excerpt from Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

September 1, 2025 • by Karen Underhill

The small body of prose by Galician Jewish writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz that was published between 1934 and 1938 has entered into, transformed, and enriched Polish, Jewish, and Central European modernisms, stretching the boundaries of how each of these bodies of modern literature is understood. It has also ...

A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

History

Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

On the Polish language as a medium for diasporic modernism

September 1, 2025 • by Alex Rossen and Karen Underhill

For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition." Recently, Underhill ...