A decelerated and aware contemplation. A slow introspection that arises in response to a meticulously wrought aesthetic object. Walter Pater asked, "What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?" To discover Hiroshi Sugimoto is to answer that question
Art is at once a product of culture and a creator of it. Our attitudes toward artists and artistic creation are currently ambivalent; society at large marginalizes artists but also reveres the few creators that float the multi-billion dollar art market. Critic Suzi Gablik investigates our attitudes t
Butoh is always intense. It is the dance of darkness after all. But in the work of the second-generation Butoh company, Sankai Juku, there is a peaceful element, more otherworldly than visceral. Even their name, which means "studio by the mountain and the sea," implies serenity and calm. Their wor
Descartes isolated himself in a cabin, set a ball of wax in front of himself, and set about determining what he could know. Martin Heidegger, some 300 years later, saw this thought experiment as all wrong: Descartes should have picked up the wax, used it, molded it. For Heidegger, the truth is reveal