The Immediate Experience

Columns

The Deal of the Art

Jonathon Sturgeon

October 12, 2018

All auctions, even the spectacular, are short-lived moments of shopping.

American Jekyll, American Hyde

Jonathon Sturgeon

June 29, 2018

How the civility police attempt to make us partners in Trump's politics of chaos and domination.

Literature Shrugged

Jonathon Sturgeon

March 02, 2018

We can learn a lot about the literary arts by understanding the long history of hatred of literature.

The Post-Text Hustle

Jonathon Sturgeon

February 19, 2018

Newspapers are more prayer than prophecy; perhaps the aim of “Welcome to the Post-Text Future” is to make an offering to the gods of digital advertising.

Simulacra, Inc.

Jonathon Sturgeon

February 01, 2018

“Disneyfication” used to mean sanitization and infantilization. Now, Disney comes to represent nothing less than the smooth functioning of media capitalism.

Spielberg’s Children

Jonathon Sturgeon

November 02, 2017

In the HBO special "Spielberg," the subject is hard to know but it's not hard to know why: it all goes back to his childhood.

New Iconoclasms

Jonathon Sturgeon

September 13, 2017

The modern history of art is a history of its removal and destruction.

Art After Social Collapse

Jonathon Sturgeon

August 10, 2017

The belief that art should become therapeutic, or that it should devote itself to comfort, is everywhere in society.

Tory Porn

Jonathon Sturgeon

July 25, 2017

For Christopher Nolan, perhaps the last Tory propagandist in cinema, “society” and “the people” do not exist.

The Ministry of Politainment

Jonathon Sturgeon

July 07, 2017

The throughline from Reagan to Trump is turning the citizenry into an audience of passive consumers.

Austerity Gospel

Jonathon Sturgeon

June 21, 2017

If visual and conceptual artists were foundational to the Occupy Wall Street movement, what about novelists?