Aesthetics Archives - Public Seminar

Artificial Intelligence–Based Aesthetics of Dissent in Turkey

AI offers an opportunity for protest in a political environment where even seemingly innocuous content can carry risks

June 18, 2025 • by Selin Bengi Gümrükçü

The ongoing protests in Turkey, triggered by the detention of Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, following the annulment of his university diploma by Istanbul University, constitute the largest cycle of political mobilization Turkey has witnessed since the Gezi Park protests in 2013. Even though the mayor was in prison, his party, ...

Artificial Intelligence–Based Aesthetics of Dissent in Turkey

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Politics

Why Does the Far Right Love a Pompadour?

Big hair and bad ideas

December 20, 2023 • by Adriana Piatti-Crocker

Why do these politicians don big hair? Perhaps their inventively crafted manes serve to hide behind their bad ideas. Or maybe, like the pompadours of male entertainers, their big hair is the best way to be remembered by voters. Who can forget such hairdos?...

Why Does the Far Right Love a Pompadour?

Theory & Practice

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

September 11, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Asger Jorn is acknowledged to be one of the great artists of the postwar years. Even more impressive in my estimation is his theoretical work. I made the case for this in The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011). Since then, two collections of Jorn’s writings have appeared in English: ...

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!

Uncategorized

Between Freud and Einstein

On the homology at the heart of modernist art

June 2, 2015 • by Renato Barilli

With this possibility of a coincidence in mind, we may dare to compare the two fundamental contributions given by Sigmund Freud in the field of the humanities and by Albert Einstein in the almost opposite world of the natural sciences. Let us remember the well-known formula on which Einstein’s relativity ...

Uncategorized

Aesthetic Community in Detroit

November 18, 2013 • by Vince Carducci

In the Huffington Post, author and community organizer Yusef Bunchy Shakur and co-author Jenny Lee write: "Detroit is modeling life after capitalism." One of the ways this is happening is through the work of artists who are helping to envision what that life might look like. These artists ...