Lauren O’Neill-Butler portrays the ten well-researched case studies that comprise her book on artistic activism, The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protests in America, as qualified successes. The working class late 1960s Women Artists in Revolution group, for example, had a formative influence on the more renowned Art Workers’ Coalition, though the former’s emphasis on women-only spaces at times risked becoming, in Adrienne Rich’s words, “an end in itself.” The 1970s Black Emergency Cultural Coalition pioneered prison arts programs more humane than many of today’s versions, yet the group didn’t prioritize feminist concerns. The prominence of artist Rick Lowe’s 1990s Houston social sculpture, Project Row Houses, accidentally ushered in gentrification during the ensuing decades. Which is all to say that even when activist artworks manage to effect change, there are caveats.

O’Neill-Butler’s caveats establish the critic as a fair-minded chronicler of an artistic mode that can attract Pollyannaish claims regarding its impact. She states up front: “my argument is not that artists are the solution” to the “various ills of society.” “What I aim to show,” she continues, “is that they have motivated change and left a major mark.”

But this measured approach raises the question: why do artists persist in mobilizing art for protest when the odds are low their efforts will have substantial effects? An artistic intervention into a systematic problem can feel like putting a fresh coat of paint on a car whose check engine light is on. Here a picture emerges from the book, which covers the post–Civil Rights era: politically inclined artists recognize that their work may have long odds or limited agency, but they also recognize that change is necessary when conditions are trying. So they respond using the tools they know best.

Consider the prescient guerrilla media collective Top Value Television (TVTV), whose citizen journalism documented the 1972 Democratic and Republican conventions, during a contentious wartime US Presidential election. Their films, The World’s Largest TV Studio and Four More Years (both 1972), were broadcast across the country soon after the conventions and showcased vernacular perspectives unavailable in contemporary network journalism. O’Neill-Butler explains TVTV’s techno-utopic hope that “in the future everyone might have access to a portable video camera and that the resultant proliferation of images would quickly change hearts and minds,” but concludes with a dark caveat: “TVTV essentially paved the way for today’s deluge of verité footage on social media,” even if the group “could never have imagined the outcome.”

This fascinating cross-era comparison highlights both the value and the limitations of The War of Art’s case-study structure. The book set out to connect the flurry of 2010s US artistic activism, which resulted in developments such as the New Museum’s staff unionization and Warren B. Kanders’ resignation from the Whitney Museum’s board, with that activism’s art historical antecedents. As the case studies unfold, the overarching theme becomes the ways that successive generations of artist-activists “sit on the shoulders of their chosen ancestors.” In consecutive chapters about two queer 1990s New York City collectives, fierce pussy and Dyke Action Machine!, O’Neill-Butler observes how their respective wheat-pasted poster campaigns not only prefigured New Red Order’s 2020s Indigenous agitprop but also drew on aesthetic tactics from the 1980s AIDS activist group ACT UP, which itself drew on 1960s and 70s civil rights and feminist movement tactics.

Yet O’Neill-Butler’s historical comparisons rarely delve into wherefores and whys. Instead, she seems content simply to point out how the formal tactics of one movement parallel those of another, sidestepping their differences in context. And she remains unwilling to theorize or define activist art. In the introduction, she contends, “it is generally not helpful to offer strict definitions of activism aside from that it is always a means to an end.” Instead, she believes that “the best way to answer these questions is not through theory or evaluative tools, but through case studies.” But the choice isn’t inherently either-or, as if theory and history were oil and water. Her reluctance to draw conclusions feel like missed opportunities to spell out takeaways from her research, given the considerable legwork she’s done. Potential caveats to her own project thus go unexplored, as when she asks, but doesn’t answer, if recent artists have “normalized” or “instrumentalized” the term “activist.”

Take, for instance, the separate chapters on ACT UP and on the artist Nan Goldin’s late 2010s Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) organization, which serve as the book’s opening and closing case studies respectively. In the former, O’Neill-Butler describes an iconic 1988 protest photograph of artist David Wojnarowicz, recently diagnosed with HIV, wearing a jacket that says: “IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA.” She views the jacket’s text and other ACT UP slogans, such as “Silence=Death,” as examples of what she calls activist art’s “take, copy, distribute” logic. But when, in the final chapter, she describes the “direct cue[s]” that P.A.I.N. took from “ACT UP’s media-savvy actions”— “speak[ing] through the media, not to the media”; staging die-ins—she stops short of considering the two eras’ dramatically different media environments. In the 2010s, the question wasn’t whether activist organizations spoke “through” or “to” traditional media outlets but how cannily they spoke outside them, using social media to parlay viral attention into institutional credibility.

In the TVTV chapter, O’Neill-Butler invokes artist Tania Bruguera’s concept of “political-timing-specific art” and quotes sociologist Stuart Hall on how such interventions can expose a culture’s “political, economic, and ideological contradictions.” The War of Art’s timing as a book inadvertently reveals similar tensions in our own artistic moment. The 2010s social media environment—which shaped so much recent discourse about the artistic activism that was this book’s impetus—looks quite different today, with many liberals retreating from X, and a general sense of fatigue with call outs and misinformation. Historical perspective is vital to understanding the present, and O’Neill-Butler does an excellent job chronicling recent artistic activism’s half-forgotten predecessors. But one moral of that history is to be careful what you wish for: even when it pans out, well-meaning citizen journalism or neighborhood revival art projects can have unintended downsides.

For more than a decade, artist Hito Steyerl has been writing—in biting, playful prose—about how images, technology, and politics are all interlinked. Her newest book on the subject, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, out from Verso, throws her consistent through lines into relief, and brings forward inconsistencies in her thinking too.

Steyerl’s first book, The Wretched of the Screen (2013), was perhaps her most rousing. “Free Fall,” a standout essay therein, interrogates the European construction of linear perspective as a means for “enabling Western dominance,” then pivots to the increasing ubiquity of aerial perspective—a militaristic, surveilling way of seeing that “projects delusions of stability, safety, and extreme mastery.” Another essay, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” urges artists to examine the exploitative politics of the art world itself, such as its reliance on under- or unpaid labor.

The artist takes to related topics in her visual work too, sometimes treating the material with an unnerving absurdity. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), one of her best-known works, navigates the question of invisibility in an increasingly surveilled world by satirizing the form of instructional video. Steyerl, the video’s protagonist, offers absurd suggestions for avoiding surveillance. Smearing chroma-key green makeup on her face, she “disappears” into the background; she also archly suggests being smaller than a pixel, being a woman over 50, and being a disappeared person as an enemy of the state. This jarring tonal contrast is emblematic of her work, the dissonance buffered by her focus on larger systems rather than specific scenarios.

Steyerl’s second book, Duty Free Art (2017), continues her project of highlighting how capital, exploitation, and art are intertwined, though it takes on a broader constellation of phenomena, including romance scams, freeport art storage, and the rise of fascism. Yet where in Wretched, the reader felt the keen glare of Steyerl’s concentration, in some of Duty Free Art’s essays, it’s hard to tell what’s fact or fiction, or just how serious Steyerl is about it all: As her international fame has risen, Steyerl has presented herself alternately as gadfly, critic, oracle of surfaces, and politically engaged artist. The opening anecdote in her 2014 essay “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise”—about smartphone cameras using algorithms and scans from a user’s camera roll to “create” images—sounds fantastically interesting, jaw-dropping if true. But Steyerl’s description of the technology proves far more fanciful than the paper she cites.

These fabulations, paired with Steyerl’s gliding, affectless authorial voice, contribute to a sense of disorientation. Nevertheless, Steyerl topped ArtReview’s 2017 Power List as the most influential person in the art world for her “political statement-making and formal experimentation.” Her best work merges these aspects: Any viewer of How Not to Be Seen will surely consider their vulnerability to surveillance, and feel the futility of escape. In a 2023 interview, journalist Philip Oltermann asked her if she “saw art as a way to point a finger at social injustices, to educate people?” Steyerl replied with a decisive no, saying “it would be pointless if art worked like that. If you want to make a difference with art, which is a motive I perceive as questionable, then the single most stupid approach would be to tell people off.”

IN HER LATEST BOOK, Steyerl returns to her familiar territory of war and violent conflict, updated for the era of Web3, and this time she expresses her stance more decisively and simply than ever before. Steyerl herself has relied on AI before, using it to generate animations and graphics; her deep interest in—and intimate familiarity with—new technologies is part of what allows her to see their potential for exploitation. In Medium Hot, she comes down hard on the so-called promise of generative AI, cryptocurrency, and the AI-fueled accelerationist fantasies of Big Tech investors. It’s exciting to see Steyerl take such a definitive position; yet in doing so, the book exposes a core inconsistency of her practice, a puzzling political lacuna.

Steyerl’s primary critique is that the industry surrounding AI and Web3 uses enormous amounts of energy and is wildly exploitative not only of the environment, but of human “micro-workers,” remote laborers paid not in wages but in tiny gamified increments, dependent on completed tasks. Crypto mining has thrived on the edge of conflict zones—as it did in Kosovo until it was banned in 2022—where political instability combined with formerly socialist infrastructure contributed to cheap energy that could immediately be put into mining. All this energy must come from somewhere: Earth itself pays the cost.

The cheap labor essential to “artificial intelligence” feeds on the exploitative conditions generated by political and economic instability. Steyerl highlights the example of Kurdish women workers in northern Iraq, who are hired to do ghost work tagging images for self-driving cars. Women often take these jobs because the work can be done from home; for some of them, home is a refugee camp where they have lived for 10 years. The irony, Steyerl points out, is that “self-driving cars were being trained by people who, in many cases, had difficulties accessing affordable transport anywhere—let alone enjoying freedom of movement across borders.”

These critiques aren’t necessarily new, but they are urgent; many opponents of AI—or rather, of its unrestricted and irresponsible use—have cited its exploitation of microworkers and its environmental harm. Steyerl makes a more novel, if subtler point when she describes how crypto art is responsible for “onboarding” people to Web3, its infrastructure “creating a new stage of financialization defined by massive waste of energy and an enormous carbon footprint.”

The NFT bubble has popped, of course. But many people have bought into this new technological environment, with crypto wallets and ChatGPT on their phones. The end result, Steyerl speculates, probably won’t be the singularity, but something much less interesting: newer and more invasive ways of getting ripped off by tech companies. For now, many AI services—Google search summaries, ChatGPT—are free. But what will happen when users become dependent on them? They’ll likely charge for subscriptions, scraping consumers’ data only to sell it back to them.
All, of course, as the world burns.

The rapid rollout of various generative AI apps—like DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Sora—has been accompanied by a hype cycle of publicity. Artists, of course, know that generative AI isn’t worth the hype: The images these tools create are universally shitty slop, scraped together from previously existing internet detritus. Yet, Steyerl argues, the breathless publicity around generative AI and its so-called creative applications masks its true, and perhaps only, utility: as a tool of dominance and warfare. Autonomous weapons and AI-driven targeting have been part of the global war playbook since at least 2021, with both Ukraine and Gaza becoming, she writes, “laboratories for testing AI warfare, very often by Western arms makers looking for a robust and regulation-free R&D environment.”

AS IN NEARLY ALL Steyerl’s work, Medium Hot is concerned with what happens in conflict regions. The book cites interviews with Kurdish workers in refugee camps, as well as conversations with recent immigrants to Germany; she mentions both the wars happening in Gaza and Ukraine. Yet, for a writer so interested in the systemic causes of exploitation and suffering, she refrains here from expressing a stance on any given global conflict, an omission that creates a strange lacuna—a kind of weightlessness that destabilizes the text.

Calling wars and genocides “conflicts”—a word that appears 21 times in the book—makes it easier to talk about their roles in systems, but it also has an alienating effect. Shouldn’t one care about the causes and conditions of those conflicts? They are not inexorable acts of machinery, their conclusions already forgone.

Perhaps Steyerl’s avoidance of taking sides originates from a formative experience. Two decades ago, she made a short documentary titled November (2004) that features clips from a shoot-’em-up Western film Steyerl made with her close friend, Andrea Wolf, when they were both 17. Only the men, the bad guys, draw weapons in the film; the women fight with their bare hands. These clips of fake violence are juxtaposed against found footage: In the 1990s, Wolf went underground to join the Kurdish Worker’s Party, or PKK. She was killed in 1998, possibly executed by the Turkish government. Wolf was made a martyr; November includes footage of protesters on the street carrying posters depicting her face.

The film, like the rest of Steyerl’s work, avoids neat narrative, yet it is profoundly about disillusionment—with armed resistance, with the hero’s righteous violence. The revolutionary desire that led Wolf to join
the PKK ended with her lying dead on a dusty road, though according to the German government, she is not dead—but merely disappeared. Steyerl acknowledges Germany’s support of the Turkish army; in her narration, she also notes that the PKK itself has committed violent crimes, including killing civilians. Clips show pro-Kurdish protests in Germany, one scene featuring a man declaring via microphone: “It is German tanks that are bulldozing Kurdish villages.”

In 2019 Steyerl protested in solidarity with Kurdish liberation, staging a performance, Women for Rojava, with three other artists. She called for Germany to stop show-ing her work “as part of its external cultural diplomacy,” continuing, “I am sick of my work being deployed to detract attention from the German state’s tacit agreement with displacement, ethnic cleansing, and warfare, and to lend it an aura of tolerance and inclusivity.” It’s impossible not to draw parallels between then and now, as US-made and German arms rain down on Palestinian refugee camps.

But Steyerl doesn’t. Though she has consistently—if with some affective distance—positioned herself as a champion of class solidarity and of the oppressed and exploited, she spoke scathingly last spring of pro-Palestinian activists who have been critical of Israel, whom she accused of enlisting “art as social media performance.” She has also critiqued the “English-language academic bubble” for, in her eyes, failing to fully comprehend Germany’s history and its commitment to defend against what it perceives to be anti-Semitism. Is Steyerl’s curious lacuna, as the deep ambivalence of November may indicate, a somewhat stifled call for nonviolence? Is it an act of self-preservation amid an increasingly bitter divide in the German art world? Or is it a stance of neutrality

Neutrality, after all, pervades Medium Hot, which, as its title suggests, frequently returns to the imagery of heat. There’s the effect of AI’s energy use on the climate, with Steyerl’s concern for the planet thrumming behind the text. It addresses as well the output of generative AI through temperature, describing how the process of statistical image rendering sees a clear image as “cool,” while adding noise creates “heat.” A new image is created by removing that noise, and therefore, Steyerl argues, these images have nothing at all to do with what is indexically “seen” by an eye, but rather what the AI model detects as hot and cold. In other words, these images are a “medium hot.” According to the laws of thermodynamics, energy is only possible when there exist regions of both hot and cold. The heat death of the universe thus occurs when neutrality has been achieved—when all temperatures are the same: when zones cannot be differentiated.

Near the end of the book, Steyerl references Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment from the early days of AI speculation. The question posed is: If you knew a superintelligent AI would eventually dominate the earth, would you support it now, or wait until you had no choice? But Steyerl knows the question is wrong, because it supposes too narrow, too dismal a future. “Maybe the thing that really exists in the future is not an autocratic, bullying basilisk but a commune or cooperative of red hackers who have finally realized a sustainable and fair economy,” Steyerl writes. “One might be bullied and threatened … but if anyone tells you that you have no choice, then you should say no.” If only she would.  

David Hammons arrived at my door thick with promise and pages. It is a “post-exhibition catalogue,” per Hauser & Wirth, who released the book about six years after the artist’s 2019 show at the gallery’s Downtown Los Angeles location. As a self-professed book lover and exhibition catalog collector, I was nearly beside myself to receive such a gift. Removing it from its wrapping, I let the book fall on my dining table with a satisfying thud, before running my hands across the smooth hard cover. The 12-by-12-inch tome weighs just under 7 pounds and features a countless number of pages—countless, because there are no page numbers to count.

I did not experience the 2019 Hammons show in LA, billed as the largest comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, and this catalog, I assumed, would offer unique perspective on his six-decades-long enigmatic practice. I opened the book and quickly discovered that there was no text. The title page flips to reveal a full-page color image with no title or year. Imagine my fervent page-turning as I opened the book to find no table of contents, no section headings, no exhibition text, no timeline, no bibliography, and no essays. No essays. Just a humble colophon and the artist’s name. Assuming does indeed make an ass out of you and me.

As a catalog—a book form traditionally intended to document an exhibition—David Hammons disappoints. This genre of book typically provides context for the art, the artist, and an exhibition; this book does not do that work. It offers hundreds of beautiful images—gallery install shots, artwork reproductions, ephemera—with no titles, no dates, no material lists, organized in no discernable order. It can be assumed that the catalog encompasses the breadth of the 2019 exhibition because that is the occasion on which it was published, but it leaves little for the hungry viewer to contend with beyond the art itself, presented in a raw and unapologetic series of images.

It would be easy to dismiss this “post-exhibition catalogue” as a mislabeled coffee table book, beautiful and easily consumed, or as a response to the anti-intellectual wave in our culture that is drastically impacting the production and publication of the research that undergirds our field. This book, I would argue, is doing the clever work of making itself inaccessible—not to the wider public, but to art historians, curators, and scholars who might seek to express some authority over Hammons’s work or his life. Thumbing intuitively, about halfway through the pages, you’ll find a series of incredible install shots of a past Hammons exhibition where his works are presented together against white walls. With no text to offer context and no dates to anchor us in time, each featured work is left to be contended with via eyesight alone.

David Hammons doesn’t function like an exhibition catalog; it functions like an artist’s book and, more significantly, like a work of art itself. After turning a few pages, readers will come across documentation of the collaborative 2011 installation of fur coats by David and Chie Hammons, made for L&M Arts in the Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. The images show the pristine frontal views of floor-length winter coats beside views of the altered backs, which the artists used much like canvas, applying various paints, char, and detritus. Those familiar with these works may know of their apt critique of class and class performance, a persistent critique for Hammons. For those who don’t, the work has been removed from the context of the gallery, making it seem as if the coats were seen spontaneously on the city street, which is where he often sources his materials.

The press release for the book states that David Hammons is a “singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction.” Hammons has been labeled “elusive” for his rejection of the institutional structures of the art world and its highly sought forms of validation. Why should his book be any different? Without an authoritative curatorial voice, the images are left to assert the artist’s voice above all others. The result is a rhythmic, almost stream-of-consciousness flow of vivid images that inform each other. There are no references to the art historical canon, no comparisons to other artistic expressions of Blackness. The works become nearly impossible to historicize, let alone identify without strong previous knowledge of Hammons’s career. In other words, Hammons said what he said already; this book of images enables him to say it again and again and again.

Here, I found myself questioning my desire for this book to be legible, conventional, and useful. Is he challenging me, scolding me, or flirting with me? His refusal to make it easy to intellectualize his work feels like an invitation to a wider audience to exercise a different set of skills: he is inviting us to see as he sees while making room for our own responses and interpretations. It is evident through the book’s images that so much of Hammons’s work is made possible by everyday audiences, whether that audience is indulgently purchasing ephemeral artworks or simply taking time to witness the sublime in the mundane. You travel through the pages and experience what compels you. It may be wholly cliché to say, but the book reads much like jazz—there is a rhythm, but it is not consistent. It lingers here or there, it gets loud and hot before lulling to a confident hum.

Looking, as this textless catalog demands, may be the prevailing lesson. The value of the book comes not only from the information it documents, but also from the experience and endurance required to consume it. Many contemporary artists owe their careers to Hammons, and as you flip through the pages it becomes increasingly clear that his practice—not a singular work, but the methods and means by which he makes—have come to define contemporary art. His use of found materials, his iconoclastic appropriation of cultural symbols, his experimentation with temporality, and his reverence for the detritus of life have all shifted and expanded the perimeters of painting, sculpture, and performance as we have come to understand them. Perhaps this is why his name is the only necessary citation—everything you need to know is right there on the title page.

We look to history to chart the future.

I came to this basic reaffirmation while reading J. Hoberman’s latest, addicting, grand cultural history, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. The snake of a title promises a lot to chew on—and the book delivers. But while in the throes of its semi-nostalgic, breathless invocation of the exciting art times of the 1960s, I couldn’t help but reflect on those first three titular words in the Now when this book greets us, on how then might become now.

Hoberman has gifted us scintillating analyses of various art epochs in his books on the culture of midnight movies, the paranoid 1960s, or the milquetoast movies of Reagan’s 1980s. The protagonist stalking his latest New York Now is Jonas Mekas, a mentor of Hoberman’s, the grand doyen of the city’s experimental cinema, and a self-styled poet who found beauty in what others had so unimaginatively dismissed as pornography (Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures), celebrity navel-gazing (Yoko Ono’s still-underrated films), or a waste of space and time (Andy Warhol’s Empire).

Mekas also co-founded New York’s Anthology Film Archives, where J. Hoberman will, in June, present a selection of shorts that he discusses in Everything Is Now. The book, indeed the era, is lined by films that offered up-to-date reflections of the period back to its people: Shirley Clarke’s portrait of the Black gay gigolo Jason; Jack Smith’s and Paul Morrissey’s mordant, hilarious send-ups of cheap-o B-Hollywood glamour; Mekas and Robert Frank’s diaristic films of their friends, shot as if the camera were at last a pencil. There were also the attention-frizzing “Happenings,” wild strobe and light shows, music chaotically blaring out the guitars of the Velvet Underground or Goldie and the Gingerbreads, partygoers doing the Frug as home movies of hot people were projected upon dancing bodies. The key thing here is proximity, the Manhattan jamming of hip-to-hip, café-to-dance-hall, making life in the city so chaotically synchronous. Amid the mishmash of the 1960s, ideas for alternative futures flowed.

Reading Everything Is Now is like facing a rolling avalanche that doesn’t care whether you live(d) or die(d): outrageous events in the downtown diaspora are strung one after the other, popcorn-string-style, with little commentary or judgement from the author. An uprising in Harlem coincides with a run of the Harlem-set Cool World (1963) by Shirley Clarke and produced by Frederick Wiseman; a week later, Warhol and Mekas sit in a building all night filming Empire, the ultimate American film: eight hours of the phallic Empire State Building shrouded in dark, then illumined by dawn.

Downtown a smidge, in 1968, a black-leather-clad Diane Arbus floats out of her 120 East 10th Street apartment to sit in a park with Linda Eastman, the future Mrs. Paul McCartney, where they discuss f-stops. At the Five Spot Café, Harry Smith attracts the attention of Allen Ginsberg as they listen to Thelonious Monk, Smith taking copious notes on how ahead or behind the beat Monk’s piano clumps were. Having befriended one another some earlier toke-filled night, Smith soon plays Ginsberg one of his hieroglyph-strewn films, which compels Ginsberg to convince acid king Timothy Leary, movie goddess Elizabeth Taylor, and a supermarket heiress to invest in Smith’s animated take on The Wizard of Oz. But the project collapses after to the suicide of the fourth and biggest backer, the millionaire son of a horse breeder. C’est comme ça. The failed ’68 assassination of the scene’s Svengali, Uncle Andy, is upstaged by the successful assassination of yet another Kennedy, and Hoberman reports that “Ray Johnson saw the next morning’s Daily News headline ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL, was mugged at knife point, and left New York City never to return.” It is a credit to Hoberman’s phlegmatic wit as a storyteller that he makes hundreds of similarly crazy events in 1960s New York roll along like it’s just the way of all things.

You will want to keep a notebook handy to jot down which of the book’s myriad cultural items you’ll want to discover or revisit. Hoberman correctly identifies the visionary LP Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970) as “the culmination of Ono’s long and winding road from John Cage’s class to Chamber Street loft concerts through Fluxus notoriety to countercultural stardom,” and considers Ono’s and John Lennon’s billboards reading “WAR IS OVER! / if you want it / HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM JOHN AND YOKO” as the ’60s’ “quintessential artwork”—a casual intermingling of the popular, the artistic, and the political that befits the Beatles’ famed 3-part harmony.

Elsewhere, the author revisits the jazz/rock debate by compiling critical hosannas and takedowns of the late-1960s flirtations with R&B and more “commercial” 4/4 beats from jazz artists Miles Davis (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew) and Albert Ayler (New Grass). In particular, Hoberman made me finally listen to the much-travestied last three albums of Ayler’s too-short life, and I found myself in surprising agreement with the music critic Robert Christgau, who praises Ayler’s later revival of “the funky tenor breaks that filled out early R&B” which so angered jazz purists, then and now. This debate is of no matter to Hoberman, whose taste and encyclopedic glean on US culture is inspiringly omnivorous.

Above all, Hoberman demonstrates the natural fluidity of art, film, music, and writing, which all remain perplexingly siloed from each other to the detrimental of all. It has been nearly 50 years since the great painter-critic Manny Farber opined on the difference between painting and criticism in the pages of Film Comment: “The brutal fact is that they’re exactly the same thing.” He went on to castigate “provincial” US criticism, which, in Farber’s eyes, “doesn’t take cognizance of the crossover of arts… as if there were a law in film criticism that you’re not supposed to get involved in the other art forms.” The status quo remains. Yet ever since his landmark collection Vulgar Modernism, Hoberman has shown that this roping-off is ahistorical. Without cross-pollination, nothing would bloom.

With the final line of the book, Hoberman hauntingly clarifies what he has written: “a memoir, although not mine.” The book charts the unconscious of the shuttered East Village Other and the Village Voice, of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitables and Jerry Schatzberg’s legendary loft parties, of a propulsive youth-led hope that one could conceivably escape the US Cold War situation, of cold-water apartments and splinter-filled SoHo floors before dreary gentrification, of late nights at the Bleecker, of Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films, and of the Film-Maker’s Cooperative. I, at 28, have never personally experienced any of that, but the cinematic-novelistic glory of Hoberman’s historical writing evokes them so convincingly as to let me feel as if I had.

In the mid-1980s, Sheree Rose, a photographer and dominatrix, instructed her partner Bob Flanagan to keep a journal of their sex life for one year. When they were finished fucking, she had him reach over, grab a pen, and write down what happened. She was always giving him prompts, in writing and in bed. With this project—which would soon become a book, titled Fuck Journal—she combined the two.

“Bob was my invention,” Rose said of the way she encouraged Flanagan turn his life as a masochist with cystic fibrosis into art. Before they met—at a Halloween party in 1981, both dressed up dead—Flanagan had been a poet. Rose was a middle-aged divorcée, a housewife-cum-punk; her partner-to-be was 10 years her junior, with two years to live.

Or so he thought. Instead, Flanagan lived until 1996, by which time collaborations with Mike Kelley and the Nine Inch Nails—as well as Visiting Hours (1994), a touring installation that combined chronic illness and sadomasochism—launched him into fame. Both Kelley and NIN discovered the artist after he nailed his penis to a wooden board for an infamous performance titled Nailed (1989), and the band subsequently hired him to star in a video that was soon widely banned. In it, a mechanical device tugs Flanagan’s nipples and genitals as he reclines in a wheelchair, eventually pretending to die.

When Flanagan died for real, at the age of 43, it was the longest recorded life anyone with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder, had ever lived. And it’s tempting to wonder whether his longevity had something to do with the way he embraced the facts of his body—its limits and its pains—instead of fighting or hiding them.

But back to Fuck Journal. It was first printed in 1987 in India by Kalakshetra Press, a publisher of religious tomes. When a shipment of Flanagan’s books eventually made its way to customs, officials glimpsed the title and, apparently offended, dumped them into the sea.

So writes Rose in her foreword to a new edition of the book. Fuck Journal has been something of a cult favorite—widely storied, hard to find, with only 300 copies having been smuggled out of India. But that stands to change thanks to Hanuman Editions, whose reissue, out in May, boasts a memorable introduction by Johanna Hedva, Flanagan’s fellow disabled artist and writer.

The book is smut, and it is matter-of-fact. “Like a grocery list,” Rose writes. Flanagan’s entries are short, scrawled out in a state of bleary bliss, ranging from the banal (“Valentine’s day fuck in spite of being tired”) to the transcendent (“I wonder if I’m still alive”). It gets a lot kinkier than that.

Keep in mind that all the while the man was dying, his body becoming undone in less recreational ways; he was enjoying a bunch of little deaths before the final big one. He was finding pleasure in the pain, surrendering corporeal control, submitting to Rose. Life was going to turn his body inside out whether he liked it or not. So he found a way to like it—which seems wise.

“I like your comics, kid. They’re very good. Just stay away from cocktail parties.”

Charles Bukowski delivered this evergreen piece of advice in the 1960s to the King of Underground Comics, Robert Crumb. Crumb indeed did his best to steer clear of the US bourgeois jet-setting class that he and Bukowski had then pinpointed as the veritable enemy.

Crumb once warned that the collective unconscious of the US “was/is the product of a commercial, industrialized, capitalist society drenched in low-grade, dishonest popular entertainment populated with human stereotypes of all kinds.” So he went underground, creating countercultural comics of the sort Robert Hughes once described, not unreasonably, as Hieronymus Bosch for the twentieth century. They capture the deathly shitting-fucking-buying mentality of the US modern landscape, and they do it better than the polite, tasteful provocations found in any gallery or museum of his time. Dan Nadel’s excellent, comprehensive biography of the legendary comic artist—Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life—shows how he did it.

If you know nothing about Crumb, you might want to first see Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff’s captivating documentary portrait of the man. Watching it, you realize that not even Franz Kafka in the throes of his most girl-haunted nightmares could have made up an original like Crumb. You get a good sense of the outré drawings, the anti-“good”-taste sensibility, and the tragicomic Ibsen-like family that created Crumb. Now, the classic 1994 film and the 2025 biography exist in a productive dialectical relationship to each other. Nadel’s deep, careful research contextualizes Zwigoff’s 1994 classic, helping us better understand Crumb’s complicated family roots. And through the remarkable intimacy Nadel achieves with his subject, we get pages of Crumb’s unvarnished considerations on art, relationships, and politics. Here is Crumb, on the outsized influence of his brother Charles: “I always liked to draw, but [Charles] made me draw comics. I just had to draw. If I didn’t… he said I was worthless.” Charles’s shame was powerful: “Once he got me on it, there was no getting off it. I was set on that track like a trolley car. Other than drawing I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even tie my shoes.”

Nadel is great at situating both Crumb’s achievement and the nature of his rebellion. Crumb became famous for drawing many characters—Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, as well as his pasty-skinned, long-legged grotesques with buck teeth and pinheads, with captions like HEY HEY HEY…KEEP ON TRUCKIN’….TRUCKIN’ ON DOWN…DOWN THE LINE. Crumb later called these string-cheese-legged creatures “psychotic manifestations of some grimy part of America’s collective unconscious.”

So naturally, Baby Boomer fans and entrepreneurs infringed upon Crumb’s copyright, bootlegging his drawings endlessly, plastering them on posters and bumper stickers, declaring it theirs in perpetuity. Eventually, Crumb had to file a cease-and-desist lawsuit against any merchandisers looking to make a cheap dollar on his labor.

He was ripped off regularly, even for his most iconic commissions. Infamously, Nadel tells us, Columbia Records only paid Crumb $600—or $5,500 today—for drawing the iconic art cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s landmark 1968 record Cheap Thrills. It was the breakthrough of Janis Joplin’s career, though compulsive-78-record-collector Crumb, who hates most American rock and pop after the 1930s, preferred Joplin’s earlier music, “when she sang old time country music and blues in small clubs.”

For our purposes, Nadel raises good questions about Crumb’s confused status in the wide world of art. One feels that his big-assed dominating girls, his weak-willed and knock-kneed boys all begging to be stepped on, his grotesque stereotypes of Black and white alike, and his generally sinister and bleak vision of American modernity all emerge from a particular popular lexicon now lost in the rush to monetize every excreted aspect of our lives. For Crumb, the early 1920s “race” records of bluesmen and “hillbilly” country singles, as well as the earliest generation of postwar comics, are at dramatic odds with later industry-produced “art of the people”: Hollywood, Motown, DC and Marvel Comics. Toward this difference, Crumb was outright contemptuous. But: this anti-capitalist talent still must, like the artists working during the age of the Medicis, eat. So he played ball with the tastemakers, galleries, museums, and money-men—to varying degrees of success.

Recall how little Crumb was paid for drawing one of the most memorable album covers ever. By the 1990s, though, he was able to sell six sketchbooks to a collector in Paris for about $100,000. He used the money to buy a new home for his family in Sauve, a small medieval village in the South of France filled with privacy-obsessed expats and May ’68 leftists fleeing the militarized Paris. Crumb’s struggle to adapt nimbly to the disastrous mandates of the unipolar, Americanized world, a world that tried and tries to tether him to a 1960s counterculture whose values he never fully identified with, is part of Nadel’s expertly detailed narrative.

In 1967, Crumb held his first museum show in the heart of Midwest USA, at the now defunct Lakeview Center for the Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois. It was a cinematic disaster by all accounts, and a prescient clash of high and low tastes. The show, “The American Scene,”was, in Crumb’s words, “my personal attack on the absurd, sick, ridiculous world that we live in,” serving up to Peorians images of girls with heads smashed into television screens (Boobtube, 1966) and of plastic women smiling so hard their faces melt from the strain (Untitled, 1966).

It was Crumb’s first time producing artwork solely for exhibition. But the innovative show generated no reviews, and he only sold a single drawing for $25. Reportedly, a middle-aged woman in a fur stole walked up to Crumb at the reception and asked him, “Why do you hate us?” He giggled, glancing nervously down at his shoes.

Coastal, urban tastes were perhaps more receptive to Crumb’s apocalyptic vision—yet to what end? The city-slick aim was to more easily commodify him. While the low-brows mined his drawings for unauthorized tees, the high-brows spun the man as an Artiste, a producer of luxury cultural goods that showed the American Nightmare like it really Is.In 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented his drawings in the exhibition “Human Concern/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art”alongside Bruce Conner, Nancy Grossman, Peter Saul. It was a landmark amalgamation of film, comics, painting, and sculpture. As noted by Nadel, himself the curator-at-large of the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, “Art history and contexts would have to expand to accommodate [Crumb’s] achievement.”

In the later post-Whitney years, Crumb began to draw to more “highbrow” tastes: his lovely book on Kafka in 1993 (next to Cheap Thrills, this was my own introduction to Crumb and Kafka as a lad of 14), a series of comics on Art and Beauty, and a fully illustrated Book of Genesis. The culmination of Crumb’s respectability, undoubtedly, came in 2006, when he signed on to be represented by David Zwirner. As Crumb notes, “Zwirner is interesting. It’s scary. You go there, they’re all nice people, just wide-eyed art idealists… And yet, what is the whole thing founded on? Money and power. So, where’s your allegiances to the working classes now, jerky? It’s hypocritical.”

Crumb “remains baffled” by the doors opened as a result of his Zwirner signing: the luxuries, the nouveau riche customs, the canonizations. He has settled into a late style that prizes the drawing of the line of a thing, rather than the thing itself. “Happens to musicians,” Crumb tells Nadel. “A lot of the jazz musicians I admire became technically better later. But in their early stuff, though they’re not as technically proficient, it has the bright enthusiasm of youth… Later they withdraw into their technical challenges.” In 2019, he drew a meticulous, topical portrait of Stormy Daniels, noting simply that he found her interesting to draw.

Though thoroughly politicized, Crumb claims he’s never been capital-P “Political.” During the 1960s, as he tells Nadel, Crumb “wasn’t involved in that [decade’s] collective political passion. I’d go to those events or any kind of political event and just wind up looking at the girls.” Nadel rephrases it: Crumb “was busy in his mind, developing elaborate idiosyncratic masturbation fantasies.” What do we make of these distractions now, as technocrats get richer, the citizens of Altadena still feel their city go up in flames, the distance between Peoria and Palestine shrinks, and we still feel conveniently helpless? Ultimately, the lesson of the great Crumb, for me, is that life blooms when one begins to see beyond the stifling confines of the horny id, even if the id will not abandon us anytime soon.

In March 1964, when Yoko Ono was 31, she performed Cut Piece, a piece that she would go on to stage five more times in her life—four times in the 1960s, and once more in 2003, at age 70. In Cut Piece, Ono sits on a stage in her best clothes with a placid expression as she instructs audience members to, one by one, take the pair of scissors she’s placed beside her and cut off a small piece of her clothing. In the ’60s, these performances took menacing turns: male participants, products of the era’s fraught understanding of sexual freedom, felt emboldened to strip Ono bare. Spectators were turned into passive witnesses. 

Cut Piece—perhaps Ono’s greatest work—was lauded as a feminist statement about the subordination of women at a time when feminism had yet to meaningfully pervade the avant-garde. Although the performance testifies to the ease with which women are objectified, it communicates multitudes through the prism of Ono’s body: it also tells the story of her native Japan’s devastation during and after World War II, which she lived through as a child. And, it’s about her relationship with John Lennon, which transformed her private life into a public spectacle, as well as the sacrifice and surrender that Ono, a passionate anti-war activist, considers a precondition for peace. 

Yoko, a new biography about Ono by David Sheff, opens with a prologue about Cut Piece, introducing her—as provocateur, martyr, and social experimenter—through the lens of her own creation. Sheff, who came up as a journalist in the eighties and nineties, knew Ono and Lennon when the latter was still alive, and his previously published interviews with the couple (and, more recently, just Ono) inform large portions of the book. In this sense, Yoko is the closest thing we might get to an authorized biography of the now-92-year-old icon, with Scheff directly positioning her life’s story against the racist and misogynistic narratives to which she has traditionally been attached in popular culture. 

Yoko Ono didn’t break up the Beatles, though she probably helped expedite the inevitable. Her vilification was fueled by the perception of Ono as an exotic temptress, and from a basic refusal to take her seriously. As the haters’ logic goes, her conceptual art is a scam—anyone could place a fruit on a pedestal, as she did with Apple (in 1966, the year she met Lennon), and call it art; her music—which artists like Lady Gaga, RZA, and Bjork have cited as an influence—is abrasive, featuring guttural screams and shrieks that no sane person would want to hear. As punishment for falling in love with Lennon, she would remain in his shadow, simultaneously hyper-visible and unknown. 

In any case, any student of modern pop-cultural history should recognize this tune—and know it’s passé. Ono’s reappraisal began in the nineties, when bands like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo broke out, their experimental blends of noise and pop hearkening to Ono’s solo projects and her collaborations with Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band. In 2002, “Yes Yoko Ono,” the first travelling retrospective of Ono’s work, kicked off its international tour, and in 2015, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a sweeping retrospective, “Yoko Ono: One-Woman Show,” surveying Ono’s output up until 1971, the year she infiltrated MoMA with flyers advertising her own nonexistent exhibition. Sundry magazine profiles (in the New Yorker and Vulture) have been written about Ono since the MoMA show, and at least two books—David Brackett’s Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, (2022) and Madeline Bocaro’s In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono (2021)—predate Sheff’s tome. 

With nostalgia culture arguably at its commercial peak, the Beatles have been dutifully resurrected in several recent projects—like the jukebox rom-com Yesterday (2019), the Peter Jackson–directed documentary series Get Back (2021), and Beatles ’64 (2024), a documentary about Beatlemania produced by Martin Scorsese. Next month, the documentary One to One: John & Yoko will be released theatrically in IMAX, an exclusive booking reserved for predicted moneymakers. 

The cynic in me sees Sheff’s biography as part of this wave of investments, expanding the Beatles universe through a kind of feminist revisionist lens that, in simply debunking the myths associated with Ono, shine a much-craved new light on retreaded terrain. More than half of Yoko tracks the tumultuous 14-year-period of Ono’s life with Lennon: their travels and artistic undertakings; their struggles with fame and addiction; and, finally, their blissful last years together between Sean’s birth and John’s death. Distinguishing Sheff’s retelling are original and/or newly gathered testimonies from the couple’s friends, relatives, and colleagues that illuminate and complicate pivotal scenes in Lenono history—their famed “bed-ins” in protest of the Vietnam War; Sean Lennon’s star-studded 9th birthday party; Lennon’s period of separation from Ono dubbed the “lost weekend” (which is also the subject of a 2022 documentary). 

The first quarter of the book, about 60 pages, delves into Ono’s “hybrid” upbringing, to use Sheff’s term: she was born to an elite family, split her early years between Japan and the States, and lived mostly in luxury, except for during the devastating, famine-stricken years of World War II. In New York, she attended Sarah Lawrence College before dropping out and immersing herself in the avant-garde scene, collaborating with John Cage and associating herself with a community of Fluxus artists. 

Sheff’s book is intent on humanizing Ono in relatable terms, responding directly to the inscrutable image of her held by her detractors. In doing so, he repeatedly invokes her solitary childhood and the cool indifference of her parents; her inability to feel at home wherever she went—thus her utopian streak; her work’s insistence on the power of imagination. Yet Ono’s appeal, in my mind at least, lies precisely in her resistance to relatability: her fiery refusal to assimilate and adhere to conventions. We see this early on, in her rejection of her parents’ conservative traditions; in her spurning of institutional learning; and, ultimately, in the challenges she posed to the worlds of music and art. Industrious and persistent, Ono epitomized the hustling artist’s lifestyle, seeking out collaborations and negotiating exhibition spaces for her installations, divisive instruction pieces (assembled in her 1964 book Grapefruit) and participatory performances (like Cut Piece). Her ambivalent relationship to motherhood is a much richer through line than her traumatic childhood, perhaps because original interviews with Ono’s two children—Kyoko Ono Cox, the daughter she had with her second husband, and Sean—contribute heavily to Sheff’s reporting. 

Onophilia pales in comparison to Beatles worship (Lennon alone has dozens of books written about him), so Sheff’s book is by no means unwelcome. It doesn’t break any news or analyze Ono’s output in fresh ways, but it does—if only as a result of catering to Beatles and Lenono stakeholders—make for a compelling romance about interracial love, freedom in the wake of the sexual revolution, and the ways work and intimacy can be intertwined for artistic couples. Like all great loves, John and Yoko’s was, for an outsider looking in, something of a mystery; it’s not “solved” by the end of the book, but rather observed in all its complexity, as ripples still coursing through one woman’s life. 

Like most, I was carried away by the epochal change to pictures that took place circa 2022, once it became possible to generate photorealistic images with the help of artificial intelligence. I read articles about DALL·E and Midjourney, becoming aware of the technology in much the same way a comfortable painter might have learned about photography in the early 1840s, acquiring a kind of knowledge that felt peripheral and required no action.

Not too much time has passed, even if the technology behind synthetic imagery has improved significantly. The scholar and photography critic Fred Ritchin, who began writing about changes in media in the 1980s, has just published an essential primer for mass visual literacy in the age of artificial intelligence: The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI.

The book’s second chapter, titled “Playing with AI,” ends with a historical coda that made me chuckle: “Many of these early synthetic images are like the daguerreotypes produced soon after the invention of photography, accused by Baudelaire and others of being ‘art’s mortal enemy.’ The critics were right, as many 19th-century painters undoubtedly agreed, but also quite wrong.”

The Synthetic Eye is interspersed with synthetic images “created by the author via text prompts,” as noted at the end of the book, made “in collaboration with either OpenAI’s DALL•E or Stability AI’s DreamStudio between 2022-24.” Indeed, of the 88 illustrations, only one, at the beginning of the first chapter—aptly titled “Exiting the Photographic Universe”—was taken with a camera. This is an impressive indulgence. “With both trepidation and enthusiasm,” Ritchin writes, “after several decades spent editing, curating, and writing about photographs, I began to experiment with generative artificial intelligence systems that bypassed the camera, hopeful that the images produced in response to my text prompts might be freer and more innovative, without some of the restrictions I had experienced.”

The restrictions Ritchin describes relate mostly to photography’s troubling inability to illustrate what is outside the frame. Though the technology powering photography has changed significantly—lighter weight cameras, DSLRs, Photoshop, sharper lenses, smartphones with front-facing cameras—its images are still indexical, traces of what is or has been there. Bypassing the camera and its constraints became possible only because the technology of making photographs has produced a surfeit, with an estimated 5 billion photos produced daily, mostly on smartphones. That is, these cameraless, synthetic images are progenies of those camera-born ones.

No criticism about images today can evade the question of improbable scale. In fact, it has become somewhat uninspiring to bemoan the image glut—a practice in criticism that began, at the very latest, in the early 1900s. Now, it is essential to speak of the reality created by an avalanche of images. This is the gist of Ritchin’s propositions in his two final chapters, where he advocates for “a responsible use of artificial intelligence” that does not “simulate the photographic,” but helps to “explore the questions provoked by these images… pathways of inquiry that AI supplies to amplify and interrogate the photographer’s work.”

One such question concerns modern warfare. With battles increasingly fought with drones, is the war photographer’s role resigned to a post-event witnessing of the trauma suffered? If so, will we come to accept a camera-made photograph of a devastated landscape side-by-side with a synthetic image of a built-up city as illustration of the cost to rebuild? And since photojournalists are now routinely targeted, can we imagine a war entirely reported through synthetic images?

As the photographic diminishes in scale, this era of “meta-photography,” as Ritchin terms it, means that an image can serve “as a portal,” a tasking attempt to “investigate what lies behind” the image. These investigations reach the sharpest degree of their moral dilemmas when it comes to the suffering, pain, or imagining of others. There are few qualms over photorealistic images of a cup on a table, but great kerfuffles follow a fake image of the Pope or of Rafah. It is not an overstatement to argue that the human need for reality, even if muddled by a virtual world filled with post-truth technologies, remains as intact as when the camera obscura was invented.

Ritchin’s closing suggestion is, rather than supplant the indexical, “we can then use artificial intelligence to investigate what is outside of photography’s ken, and also to make sense of the trillions of images that have been made while, within constraints, helping to conceptualize what they depict.”

Photographs, he is ultimately saying, will not disappear, even if they become scarcer. We must prepare for a transformative “age of AI” in which boundaries blur between synthetic and camera-born images, in which we are obliged, as everyday critics and engagés of visual culture, to make sharper distinctions between them. Failing which we are damned by our illiteracy.

THE DREAM OF TEACHING: take students to a museum, put them in front of a great work of art, have them describe what they see, and in so doing, discover that greatness for themselves. Rarely, many a museum educator will share, is this what happens. We arrive before the work of art riddled with biases, assumptions, presumed knowledge, and conditioned patterns of viewing, all of which make it tremendously difficult to see what is right in front of us.

This is the problem Albert Barnes was contending with when he founded his museum and educational institute in Marien, Pennsylvania, in 1922. The baggage visitors brought to the art in his collection included a conservative resistance to the avant-garde, yes, but even more than that, they brought with them the widespread racism of early 20th-century America.

Today, the Barnes Collection is best known for its lush Renoirs and joyous Matisse mural; Barnes acquired his collection at a time when Monet still looked radical to most Americans. But he was also one of the earliest United States collectors to exhibit African objects as art. And famously, he took a formalist approach to displaying his collection, selecting and grouping works not by chronology or context but by visual elements like color and shape.

At the Barnes Collection, relocated to a new building in downtown Philadelphia in 2012 against its founder’s wishes, these “ensembles,” as the foundation calls his groupings of artworks, have been meticulously re-created. The arrangement provides one of the most singular experiences of art viewing in museums today, juxtaposing work made in distinct eras, places, and media. In theory, such an approach would de-hierarchize a historically elitist field and welcome new makers and modes of representation.

In his new biography of Barnes, Blake Gopnik foregrounds this democratic ethos, focusing specifically on the philanthropist’s contributions to building racial equality—despite Barnes’s notoriously cantankerous personality and his tendency toward invective and slur. Barnes’s support for Black culture extended beyond his collection. He made a point of hiring African American workers for his factory and paying them a fair wage, invested in the Black magazine Opportunity, and eventually partnered in his foundation with the historically Black Lincoln University.

GOPNIK OPENS HIS BOOK, The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream, at a 1924 banquet at the Civic Club in Harlem. The event is often invoked as one of the founding moments in the Harlem Renaissance, gathering together more than 100 writers, publishers, and editors, from the renowned intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to the young poet Gwendolyn Bennett. The guest list deliberately included white supporters of Black creativity; Barnes was in attendance. Gopnik describes the arrival in an indigo-blue Packard sedan of “an ox of a man in a double-breasted greatcoat and fedora.” Barnes loved to make an entrance, and he thrilled at being one of the few white attendees able to speak to the aesthetic qualities of African art.

Not just speak to, but show off, as he declared: “I have in my house ample proof in the works of these moderns that much of their inspiration came from ancient [Black] art.” This overture may come as a surprise to those readers who know Barnes for his widely beloved collection of French painting. I suspect part of Gopnik’s goal is to produce such surprise, to make us see Barnes in a new way.

But the move also speaks to the role African art played in French modernism, from Picasso’s Cubist forms to Modigliani’s masklike portraits. And it underscores how difficult it is to chart those always asymmetrical relationships between the African artists who inspired and the European artists who appropriated them.

Barnes saw himself as “elevating” what were often ritualistic objects to the status of “art,” but theorists like Walter Mignolo point out how this kind of thinking still relies on a hierarchy bound up with the explicit and implied violence of coloniality. Many of the African objects European artists were exposed to were stolen or looted, their very presence in Europe made possible by way of an imperial infrastructure of transit.

Gopnik does not try to absolve his subject from the prevailing prejudices of his time; he admits Barnes was operating, using 21st-century parlance, with a “white-savior complex,” that Barnes cast African cultures as primitive, and also manipulated support for Black communities in pursuit of his own ends. Barnes, for example, balked at a proposal for the construction of 126 small houses adjacent to his foundation in Merion that he saw as detracting from his stately property, and made threats to discourage the zoning commission.

In navigating Barnes’s approach to African art, Gopnik relies heavily on the scholarship of Alison Boyd, author of a dissertation on Barnes and the director of research and interpretation at the Barnes Collection. Boyd argues that though Barnes appreciated African art, he was ultimately unable to see it as modern. Boyd’s appointment is an example of the Foundation’s willingness to question its founder’s legacy, as is their recent commission of a film by Isaac Julien. To celebrate the institution’s centennial in 2022, an exhibition debuted Julien’s five-screen installation Once Again … (Statues Never Die); the work was also included in last year’s Whitney Biennial. The film stages a conversation between Barnes and the quintessential Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke, the exchange based on actual correspondence between the two men. Speaking in the museum’s galleries, both meditate on the role African culture played in the history of art, and the ways art might champion African identity.

The film also deals with the ethics of holding African objects in Western museums at all. It includes views of the Pitt Rivers Museum, a notorious repository of looted objects (some recently returned). Julien draws connections between the violence of the past and artmaking in the present. In the film, we see the 20th-century African American sculptor Richmond Barthé at work on Black sculptural bodies in an atelier filled with neoclassical plaster casts; Barthé’s sculptures were exhibited as part of Julien’s installation. A song cowritten and performed by Alice Smith layered throughout the film speaks to restitution not as a question of righting past wrongs but of restoring future possibilities. Ultimately, Julien leaves open the matter of how museums might reckon with their often fraught inheritance.

THE BARNES WHO FEATURES in Julien’s film shares much with the character Gopnik offers, not least his strident tone and seeming inability to listen. When he could have been comfortable enough to relax and enjoy his collection, he remained restless and argumentative. Barnes, a chemist, made his fortune with a new formulation for an antiseptic that became widespread in treating gonorrhea. He developed that product, Argyrol, with his business partner, chemist Herman Hille. The two later parted ways, in part because Hille (accurately) accused Barnes of bribing doctors to plug their products.

Gopnik recounts numerous spats between Barnes and his sometimes friends, entertaining episodes that leave the reader feeling a sense of tedium with a man who seems to work constantly against his own best interests. It is relevant to Gopnik’s story about a “maverick’s” pursuit of the American dream that Barnes was born poor, that he had to fight for what he wanted from the start, and that he carried throughout his life a sense of his status as an outsider despite his growing fortune.

One friend Barnes seems never to have strayed from was the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The two met when Barnes took Dewey’s graduate seminar at Columbia in 1917 and maintained a friendship for 35 years. Dewey’s progressive approach to education provided the basis for the educational program Barnes developed, bolstering Barnes’s own interest in creating a democratic environment for learning. The philosopher dedicated his 1934 book Art as Experience to Barnes, suggesting the relationship was to some degree reciprocal, though the $5,000-a-year stipend Barnes arranged for Dewey likely helped.

Barnes first tested Dewey’s pedagogical ideas on his factory workers, engaging them in weekly seminars to look at art and discuss philosophical texts. Once he established his foundation, Barnes initially hoped those workers who had become most interested in his art would be the guides to the collection: Those few burgeoning art lovers “will take the others of our workers into the Foundation a couple of times a week and each will describe his own honest reactions to what he sees.” Rather than a top-down approach to art education, the “Barnes Method” relied on individual self-determination, making the museum, in its founder’s words, “nothing but a place where people can see for themselves.”

Barnes elaborated his method in thousands of published pages and trained select appointees to teach it. And yet, Barnes seemed rarely to have appreciated what anyone else saw in his collection. Reputedly, he hovered behind visitors and ejected them from the museum if they said something he didn’t like—this, assuming they were admitted at all. Barnes required interested parties to write to request admission, and many aspiring admirers were refused. Gopnik cites a critic who described the rigorous admissions process: “There are formalities to be undergone, records to be looked into. The Pope, sitting on his throne in the Vatican, is much less careful for his most holy toe than is Dr. Albert Barnes for his hundred and twenty Renoirs and his two and forty Soutines.”

The stakes were high for Barnes. His ultimate goal was not to cultivate a world of art lovers. He had in mind something much grander: the making of a richer and fuller American life. That he saw art as the path to a better world is admirable; that he controlled the interpretation and experience of that art so rigidly, less so. Regardless, his work is testament to a belief that would seem quaint, if it didn’t also seem so desperately necessary—that art, in Gopnik’s words, can “do real work in the world.” If only those in power would let it. 

IT TAKES A STRONG STOMACH for paradox to write that Paul Cézanne “cannot be written about any more.” When art historian T.J. Clark began a 2010 London Review of Books article on the painter this way, he meant no insult. The post-Impressionist and proto-modernist Cézanne was one of the keenest observers of the industrial disenchantment of late 19th-century Western Europe. In the 21st century, Clark argued, his paintings had become “remote to the temper of our times,” ergo, a tough subject. Accordingly, Clark’s new study of the painter, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present, is a book about Cézanne, but also about the difficulties of writing such a book. 

Clark accepts that Cézanne’s paintings communicate some fundamental quality of modernity, and he is willing to risk almost anything to hunt down what it was. His worry, sometimes more palpable than his overarching argument, is that Cézanne can’t be caught. Many mysteries are solved in these pages. Others are answered only with more mysteries. It is one of the most consistently strange studies of an artist I’ve ever read. 

For Clark, Cézanne felt the modern condition as an intermingled banality and strangeness. Older artists (like Pissarro and the Impressionists) had mixed the two already, and younger ones (like Matisse) would go on to rearrange them in a number of novel ways. Cézanne’s unique achievement was to balance banality with strangeness so precisely that neither one predominated. His still lifes, landscapes, and portraits are familiar, but not comfortingly so—they’re as vivid and intangible as a hologram, bright but unnourishing, and not even in a stark, grand way that can be dignified into tragedy. And because this is all apparent at a glance, there is no secret waiting to be uncovered, none of the delights of decoding to sweeten the deal. Everything is on the surface in these paintings, yet just out of reach.

For at least a century, art critics (Roger Fry and Meyer Schapiro appear frequently in these pages) praised Cézanne for the solidity and indelibility of his images, for giving walls and apples and tables a thing-ness more realistic than conventional realism could manage. For Clark, this is only half the story: Cézanne tried to convey something solid and indelible about modernity, and he fell short—not for lack of talent but because everything solid in the modern world melts into air. Instead of assuming emptiness, Cézanne stumbled upon it. It was a fitting achievement for his era, in which bourgeois alienation had sunk in but alternatives were still within living memory.

THAT, AT LEAST, IS MY UNDERSTANDING: Clark seems remarkably reluctant to draw explicit conclusions in If These Apples Should Fall, so much so that it’s worth thinking more about why. In his recent work, Clark has written at greater length about the challenges of converting pictures into words; his analyses of paintings are at least in part (this time around, it’s often the bigger part) analyses of what it means to analyze paintings. A passage from his previous book, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018), seems to loom over his latest: “Paintings are not propositions: they do not take the form of image-sentences. They are not even like propositions. That is, they do not aim to make statements or ask questions or even, precisely, to seek assent.” A painting does take “a view of things,” as Clark writes, but “it is an ordering of things more open and centrifugal—more noncommittal—than grammar can almost ever countenance.” Words and pictures aren’t the same and never will be. It’s an unanswerable problem, infuriating in its obviousness. Small wonder so many art critics ignore it.

Clark tries to be as precise as possible about a painting but doesn’t smooth over his own efforts at precision, so that the final product displays a dapple of successes and failures. For every dazzling insight, there is a half-step backward as Clark senses a phrase pulling him slightly too far one way or the other. Pissarro’s landscapes seem to happen “all at once,” but those three words “can be about simultaneity as much as suddenness.” Cézanne’s apples and pears are “vivid,” but the adjective doesn’t necessarily imply tangibility, and in his still lifes it implies exactly the opposite. Straining for a phrase to describe this ungraspable vividness, he writes that “the one I would opt for is ‘object of the exercise,’” but then immediately concedes that his own phrase is “over-neat.” Judgments tend to begin in a hesitant first-person before they rise to the third. A good chunk of the book’s second chapter consists of entries from Clark’s journal. The introduction finds space for not one but two of his poems.

It sounds self-indulgent, but even before we get to Chapter One, the ends are justifying the means: Clark is an astonishingly good judge. He can bend language around an image until the two are only millimeters apart, which is why his awareness of language’s limits carries real weight. There are bold observations on almost every page of this book: the color in Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Château Noir (ca. 1900–04) is “crystalline . . . not resistant to light, not reflective or refractive”; and a single snippet from one of the poems—“It is the floor of the earth / emerging after the flood, with colours stacked in a small neat pile to one side, / Waiting to be used”—somehow manages to be a better description of Hillside in Provence (1890–92) than any prose handling I can recall. Clark can do aphorism (“There are no secrets in Cézanne”) and allusion (The Black Clock, a stuffy still life, is “out of Madame Bovary or The Turn of the Screw”), and he darts nimbly through a century of Cézanne criticism, disputing here and there without displacing entirely. In maybe the most telling moment in If These Apples Should Fall, he quotes a 1910 passage from Fry about the certainty, deliberateness, and absoluteness of Cézanne’s still lifes, and then declines to explicitly rebut this trio with his own “list of implied contingent negatives,” writing that “I want them to go on unappeasedly haunting Fry’s positives.” 

It’s here, I think, that Clark comes closest to spelling out why he chose to write about Cézanne in an indirect, self-questioning way. He wants to write about Cézanne the way Cézanne painted the world; he wants to model, not just make, an argument. His late prose style, with its strange blend of doubt and authority, finds its match in Cézanne’s technique: vivid observations collect one by one, but the result is to make their subject perpetually seem one more vivid observation away, sowing unease about the big picture. 

And maybe there is no big picture, only many pictures: Clark writes that Cézanne defined the modern condition by balancing not only banality and strangeness, but also “plainness and hyperbole,” “seriousness and sensuousness,” “lugubriousness and euphoria,” “evenness and disequilibrium.” He can’t decide if Cézanne painted “reality or phantasmagoria,” nor if the way he painted them feels “consoling or enraging.” This endless swerving dizzies at first, but after a while it comes to seem like an essential piece of Clark’s argument. He offers brilliant description after brilliant description of Cézanne’s paintings, close approximation after close approximation—none of which quite does the trick. As late as the penultimate page, we find him confessing, “A voice in my head, looking over this and assenting, is almost ready to change its mind about the argument—the affect—of the book as a whole.”

Clark doesn’t change his mind, amusing though that might have been. But—and this is the really trippy part of If These Apples Should Fall—the possibility haunts unappeasably, and in so doing, it conveys things that sentences alone never could. I don’t think Clark finds the right words for Cézanne. He’s superb on the paintings’ emptiness, remoteness, lugubriousness, banality, and other negatives; he’s slightly but noticeably less good on their positives: their sensuousness, fabulousness, euphoria, lushness. He can’t compete with Cézanne’s perfect balancing act. Emptiness is permitted the last word as it is not in the paintings themselves, where last words don’t exist. But by struggling to find the right language for Cézanne, as Cézanne once struggled to find the right brushstrokes, Clark could almost be said to fail in the same fabulous manner as his protagonist. Even stranger: by mirroring the failure so exactly, he could almost be said to succeed.

This article appears under the title “Apples to Apples” in the October 2022 print issue of Art in America, pp. 30-34.