cultural criticism

Mechanical Reproduction, “Wise One,” Aura, Politics

April 6, 2018 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. … In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. — Walter Benjamin, as translated by Harry Zohn The other day when I asked Alexa on an Amazon Echo to play John Coltrane’s “Wise One” and, a split second later, when McCoy Tyner’s piano chords filled the room, two references […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Beethoven, cultural criticism, Donald Trump, jazz, Jean Baudrillard, John Coltrane, movies, televison, Walter Benjamin

Smithson, Tuymans; Art & Explication

September 6, 2016 by William Eaton

Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray I Robert Smithson’s Mirrors and Shelly Sand (images above) is a long, low, floor-lying crest of sand (approximately 30 feet by 5 feet), which is divided in equal parts by 50 double-sided mirrors.[1] Division and reflection—reflection in the sense of light, images, and ideas being thrown back without being absorbed—are central concepts here. As regards division, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, beauty, capitalism, cultural criticism, intellectuals, Oscar Wilde

Trow Television Love No Context

November 10, 2015 by William Eaton

(1) One week this past October, The New Yorker’s television critic, Emily Nussbaum, wrote a piece which began by dissing—as making “little sense”; “élitism in the guise of hipness”—one of the great works of American cultural criticism, previous New Yorker writer George W.S. Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context.”[1] The week after Nussbaum’s piece appeared, another New Yorker writer dissed Henry David Thoreau’s writing as “Pond Scum.” Thus I might write about Americans’ struggle not to be held, or […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: advertising, cultural criticism, Edward VIII, gay lives, George W.S. Trow, love, New Yorker, postmodernism, televison

Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, Pearl Theater

Better pleased with madness

March 12, 2015 by William Eaton

A favorite short speech from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. A young prince, in love with a lovely, seeming shepherd girl (see photo above), is warned by his father’s right-hand man to take heed, “be advised.” The young man’s response echoes the human response to life in general. I am advised, he says— by my fancy: if my reason Will thereto be obedient, I have reason; If not, my senses, better pleased with madness, Do bid it welcome. The most unfortunate […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: A Winter's Tale, cultural criticism, flowers, Internet, Shakespeare, theater

Adorno Was Right?

October 19, 2012 by William Eaton

Adorno Was Right? (Consumer culture is “a medium of undreamed of psychological control”?) William Eaton Review of Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) {Click for pdf} Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World is not all that interested in consumption, consumer culture or the postwar world, and the many pleasures it indeed offers are entirely intellectual, stemming as they do from the writings […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Adorno, cultural criticism, Habermas, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Susan Sontag