Controversy Archives - Public Seminar

Would-be fascists on the Right and would-be commissars on the Left

February 28, 2022 • by Greil Marcus

There are would-be fascists on the right and would-be commissars on the left. All they need is institutional power, and they will speak as art, against art: Caesar will become God, and God will tell Caesar it is right....

Philosophy

How Should We Commemorate Mary Wollstonecraft?

Why the current controversy is curiously appropriate

November 19, 2020 • by Sandrine Bergès

On Tuesday, November 10, the British sculptor Maggi Hambling’s new monument to Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled on Newington Green, in North London – and almost immediately, there was an uproar. On social media and in newspapers, the monument was variously decried (“What the actual fuck is this?”) and mocked as “a ...