Critical Inquiry

Late one early-autumn night, I crawled through the narrow tunnel of a plastic Klein bottle constructed on my college campus. The 3D equivalent of a Möbius Strip, the bottle was a skeleton of flexible PVC pipes and a skin of clear plastic stitched to it with white twine. To guard against mild winds, the bottle was staked to the ground and pulled taut, tied to the bare branches of the trees above. My crush crawled through first, and I followed into the wide arched belly of the bottle. We lay side by side talking for hours, shielded from the light…

“What art might offer is always modest on its own, and, from one angle, art has never looked smaller. But from another angle, in the right conditions, it might offer something close to an actual survival skill.” — Ben Davis, Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy I. Critic Ben Davis offered this concluding thought in his new collection of essays, Art in the After-Culture. His was the final book I would read in 2022, and these words seem an appropriate summation for a time in which writing about art feels both absolutely urgent and entirely inconsequential. Art’s “smallness” becomes…