Athenaeum Review – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Today, a discussion with Tyler Cowen about aesthetics in general, and new aesthetics in particular!

More Information

• A Call for New Aesthetics, from Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

• New Aesthetics grantees

• Stripe CEO Announces New Aesthetics Grant Recipients

• Marginal Revolution and Conversations with Tyler

In This Episode

• (01:17) Aesthetics and the vision of the good life in politics and public affairs

• (03:20) Patrick Collison on ten important historical novels: the most popular literary critic of the year

• (07:02) Doubts about oversimplified left-brain / right-brain theories of knowledge

• (09:29) Understanding 'what is': proper nouns are underrated

• (11:09) In the Instagram era, is travel past its peak?

• (14:50) Consensus is possible amongst critics, against pure subjectivism

• (16:36) Is it worth trying to appreciate art forms that don't naturally appeal to one's taste?

• (18:50) Does newness rule in aesthetics? Popular music as evidence to the contrary

• (23:08) Henry Adams never listened to Jimi Hendrix

• (24:08) LLMs' use of language creates the illusion of consciousness

• (26:33) A portfolio approach to aesthetic judgments; considering forgery and AI-generated pictures; famous forgers are overrated; the Haydn forgeries

• (29:20) Overrating the name of the artist; the worst Shakespeare plays

• (30:52) Neither "Wild Honey Pie" nor "Hello, Goodbye" are the worst Beatles songs; the synergy of John and Paul

• (34:16) Does the new Gilded Age compare unfavorably to the old Gilded Age in its impact on public space? New museums including the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; the new art museum in Memphis, the Quai Branly; the National Museum of Qatar in Doha; the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru

• (37:30) Reasons not to worry that new digital artworks won't last very long in the grand sweep of history

• (38:24) Putting fears of obsolescence in perspective: how many people know all the Bach cantatas or Monteverdi madrigals?

• (39:30) About the New Aesthetics grants; the problem with contemporary architecture; reasons for optimism

• (42:57) Underrated artists: William Kentridge; David Hockney (really); the composer Robert Ashley

In this episode, philosopher and art critic David Carrier discusses a new survey exhibition of the artist Marcel Duchamp, the subject of his review in the forthcoming issue of Athenaeum Review.

More information:

Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (April 11 to August 22, 2026)

David Carrier - Art Writer

A conversation with Dr. Leigh Arnold, curator of Haegue Yang: Lost Lands and Sunken Fields at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Marc Masurovsky co-founded the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) in September 1997. In this conversation: how the project began; the case of Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally at MoMA in New York; current challenges and opportunities in art restitution; ethics and strategy; the role of the internet and digitized materials; and much more.

In this conversation: war poems by Walt Whitman, Yehuda Amichai, and Siegfried Sassoon; Jonathan Shay's books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, how veterans view the representation of war in Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now; Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death; war and politicians from the Iliad and Thucydides to Henry Kissinger; and much more.

See also: Tom Palaima, "Writing on War"

Thomas G. Palaima is Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is recipient of a MacArthur fellowship (1985-90) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.

Correction: The two senators who stood tall opposed to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution were Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. He has said that "‘Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole."

Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer and curator.

In this conversation: the importance of holistic understanding in art history; postmodernism and theory-driven vs. object-centered criticism; literal-mindedness and abstraction vs. embodied and emotional understanding; power and self-aggrandizement vs. wonder and awe; the power of beauty and the criticism of Dave Hickey; Kandinsky vs. Malevich; AI in art; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and more!

Mai Wang is an assistant professor of literature at UT Dallas, where she teaches Asian American and Chinese diasporic literature. 

Her first book project, The Asian American Renaissance, examines the imaginative alliances formed between diasporic Asian American authors and their nineteenth-century American predecessors.

In this conversation: How Asian American authors have formed imaginative alliances with their 19th century predecessors; Eileen Chang and Emerson's concept of negative freedom; Carlos Bulosan and America Is in the Heart; and much more!

Michael Thomas is curator of The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples at the Meadows Museum, Dallas, as well as From Texas to the World: Common Ground at UT Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Art.

In this conversation: What the Bourbons discovered in 18th-century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum; the effect of the Grand Tour; 18th-century archaeological techniques; highlights of the exhibition; artists at the Spanish royal court, and more!

Gerytades: An Aristophanes Play... sort of, by poet and translator A.M. Juster, is out now from Contubernales Publishing.

In this conversation: How Gerytades was lost and found; what makes for great comedy; timeliness and timelessness in human nature; how to approach a play that survives in fragments; the fate of light verse; literature, humor, and the underworld; approaches to translating Latin; and much more!

"Dragon Eye," Thomas Riccio's immersive video installation documenting the culture of the Miao people of China, was recently on view at the SP/N Gallery at UT Dallas.

In this conversation: The process of visiting and doing research with the Miao people in remote mountain villages; cultural preservation in the face of modernity; "Form Fatigue"; an example of a healing ritual; the relationship between Indigenous rituals and Western performance; doing theater in Chicago, Alaska, and Dallas; anthropology and AI; Sophia Robot: Post Human Being; and more!