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!

Thomas Locke Hobbs is a photographer whose books include L.A. Vedute, which was shortlisted for Aperture Photobook of the Year, and Rampitas.

In this conversation: Cities in the U.S., Peru and Colombia; domestic architecture, density and class division; negative space in the built environment; Eugène Atget and photo history; season, climate, and mood in Los Angeles; the photo book as object; and more!

Franklin Einspruch is the editor of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art, by Walter Darby Bannard, and the proprietor of Dissident Muse Journal.

In this conversation: Why the aphorism?; the significance of abstract art and of Clement Greenberg; the place of commitment in art; how to teach art; the relationship between creativity, intuition, imagination, and habit; the practice of art criticism; and more!

In this episode, the composer and critic Daniel Asia discusses Jefferson Lives! , a new chamber opera from composer Joshua Daniel Nichols and librettist and director Stefanos Koroneos, that explores John Adams’ deathbed reflections about the founding of the United States.

More information:

Polyhymnia.org

Jefferson Lives! at Teatro Grattacielo, New York

Erika Doss is the author of Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (University of Chicago Press).

In this conversation: why art historians have often neglected the intersection of art and faith in modernism; the fluidity of religion in modernity; modern artists vs. religious artists; comparing Christian Science, Bahá’í, occultism, and Byzantine Catholicism; dominant and marginal American identities; and more!

Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University, with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty, is the author of Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame, 2022). The journal Modern Theology recently devoted a forum to this book, with contributions from Cyril O'Regan, Kevin Hart, William Desmond, Ben Quash, and Anne M. Carpenter, and a response by the author.

In this conversation: The path from Minding the Modern to Incomprehensible Certainty; what is an image?; which figures were included in the book (and which were not but might have been); how the Renaissance and Baroque periods fit into the book's argument; the problem of disciplinarity and specialization; phenomenology in contrast to other critical theories; the relevance of Gerschom Scholem's Walter Benjamin; and more!

Gary Saul Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He is the author of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press).

In this episode: How Russian literature differs from English or French literature; contrasting the 19th and 20th centuries; the role of revolutionary violence; the importance of small moments in shaping history; translation recommendations; suggestions on short Russian novels; and more!

Maryann Corbett's translations of three ballades by Christine de Pizan appear in the Winter 2024 issue of Athenaeum Review.

In this conversation: The poet's life and times amidst the Hundred Years' War, the Western Schism and the execution of Joan of Arc; the literary debate on the rights of women; the poet's representation of courtly love; the ballade as a poetic form; and much more!

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan University Press, 2023). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Dark Horse, the New Statesman, the Hopkins Review online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her poetry has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award; has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Poetry Foundation website; and was included in The Best American Poetry 2018. New work is forthcoming in Raritan, Image, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

Christine de Pizan (1364-c. 1430) was the author of The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, among many other works.

Brian Allen, a senior fellow at National Review Institute and National Review’s art critic, is an art historian living in Arlington, Vermont and a frequent contributor to Athenaeum Review.

In this conversation: the transition from museum director to full-time art critic; the state of art criticism and the value of diverse points of view; how to cultivate a critical perspective; the state of art museums in America; curatorial trends in 2024; and more!

Bill Kristol is director of ⁠Defending Democracy Together⁠, editor at large of ⁠The Bulwark⁠, and the host of ⁠Conversations with Bill Kristol⁠.

In this conversation: moving from academia to Washington, D.C.; changing perspectives over the course of a career in politics; the successes and failures of American conservatism; the most insightful political observers today; what to learn from the most successful political figures; liberalism vs. populism, and more!

Micah Mattix is Professor of English at Regent University and the editor of the Prufrock newsletter on Substack. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, National Review, and The New Criterion, and was appointed poetry editor at First Things in 2021.

In this conversation: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, ten years of Prufrock; the state of literary criticism and of literary publishing; reflections on teaching poetry; advice to students and young poets; and more!

"A Brief History of Emergence," by Frederick Turner, Robert Stern, and Roger F. Malina, appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Athenaeum Review.

In this podcast: Why is emergence important in complex systems? How is emergence important for physics, for geophysics and for the arts? What is an emergent university? How is emergent research conducted? Discussion of the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, time, evolution, and being.

See also:

"Emergence: A chaotic system pushed into organization" (YouTube/UTD Geoscience Studio)

"Henri Bergson on why the existence of things precedes their possibility" (Aeon)

Physics of Emergence and Organization (ed. Licata & Sakaji)

Jason Andrew is the founding partner at Artist Estate Studio, LLC, the entity that manages the estates of Jack Tworkov and Elizabeth Murray among others. Over the past 20 years, he has organized historic exhibitions and published extensively on the life and work of Jack Tworkov. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

 Midori Yamamura, Ph.D., is the Alcaly/Bodian Distinguished CUNY Scholar,  the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC), The CUNY Graduate Center and the Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art at CUNY Kingsborough. She is the author of "Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular” (MIT Press, 2015) and Co-Editor and a contributor to "Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles: Arts in East and Southeast Asia" (Routledge: 2021)

Frederick Turner's collection of poems, LATTER DAYS, is available from Franciscan University Press:

https://www.cuapress.org/9781736656136/latter-days/

A conversation with author and critic Sean Hooks.

Part one:

Roy Lichtenstein in the Studio, at the Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center

"Roy Lichtenstein show reveals the artistry behind pop art simplicity" (Dallas Morning News / archive link)

Part two:

"Put Your Kids to Work," a novelette by Sean Hooks in Socrates on the Beach

Sean Hooks at Athenaeum Review

Muscle Man, a novel by Jordan Castro

Lieutenant Gustl by Arthur Schnitzler

Homer Out Loud at Deep Vellum in Dallas

Daniel Asia has been an eclectic and unique composer from the start. He has enjoyed the usual grants from Meet the Composer, a UK Fulbright award, Guggenheim Fellowship, MacDowell and Tanglewood fellowships, ASCAP and BMI prizes, Copland Fund grants, and numerous others. He was recently honored with a Music Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As a writer and critic, his articles have appeared in Academic Questions, The New Criterion, the Huffington Post,  New Music Connoisseur, and American Institute for Economic Research.  He is the author of Observations on Music, Culture and Politics, recently published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and editor of The Future of (High) Culture in America (CSP).  The recorded works of Daniel Asia may be heard on the labels of Summit, New World, Attacca, Albany, Babel, Innova, and Mushkatweek. Mr. Asia is Professor of Music at the University of Arizona, and President of the Center for American Culture and Ideas (a 501c3).

His website is www.danielasia.net.

Zohar Atkins is is the Founder of Etz Hasadeh, a Center for Existential Torah. He is a Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He holds a DPhil in Theology from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and semikha from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was a Wexner Graduate Fellow. He received both an MA and BA from Brown University. In 2016, The Jewish Week named him one of the “36 under 36 Changemakers in Jewish Life.”

The winner of a 2018 Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, Zohar is the author of An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Nineveh (Carcanet, 2019).

 

https://www.zoharatkins.com/

Peter Chametzky is Professor of Art History, and has been on the SVAD faculty since 2012. His research focuses on 20th and 21st century German art and culture.

From 1998 to 2012 he taught at Southern Illinois University, first as Associate Professor and then as Professor, and served as Director of the School of Art and Design on the Carbondale campus from 2008-12. He served as Director of the UofSC SVAD from 2013-2018. Previously, he taught at Adelphi University (1990-98), the School of Visual Arts (1984-88), and in the School of Continuing Education at New York University (1986-88). He earned his Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1991. His B.A., also in Art History, is from Cornell University. He has also studied in Freiburg iBr, and Stuttgart, Germany.

Andrew Amstutz studies modern South Asian history in global contexts. His work explores the intertwined histories of science, technology, and Muslim politics in South Asia as well as museums and public history debates. He currently is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. At UA Little Rock, he teaches courses on Asian history, world history, museum studies, and material culture. Dr. Amstutz received his PhD in history from Cornell University in 2017 and prior to joining UA Little Rock, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His first book project, “Finding a Home for Urdu: Language and Technoscience in Muslim South Asia,” argues that experiments with technology and debates over science lie at the heart of the making of Indian Muslim politics. It offers a cross-border history of a leading publishing house in South Asia that experimented with the print technologies and literary arts of Urdu to produce popular science texts during the late colonial era and early post-independence period (1910s-1960s.)

Dr. Amstutz’s second book project, “Buddhist Afterlives: The Public Life of the Ancient Past in Pakistan,” follows the global circulation of ancient Buddhist artifacts from Pakistan during the Cold War. The project chronicles how museum curators and archaeologists in Pakistan turned to Buddhist sculpture to exhibit an ancient history for the new Muslim nation-state in the wake of partition and post-colonial independence and to forge an eclectic identity for Pakistan through collaborations with colleagues across Asia and Europe. His research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship program and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.

Turner’s Modern World at the Kimbell Art Museum: https://kimbellart.org/exhibition/turners-modern-world

Turner’s Modern World catalog: https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847869343/

What made Turner modern? (1:00) — Stylistic transition in the 1830s; “painting with tinted steam”; The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (4:30) — The sublime and the incomprehensibly powerful; painting a steamship in a snowstorm (8:00) — Contrast with Ruskin on medievalism and industrialization; The Thames Above Waterloo Bridge; canals and steam engines (12:30) — Mark Twain trashes The Slave Ship; evolving reception and public appreciation of Turner’s style (17:15) — A British painter; traveling in Europe; Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen; seeing Venice, Venetian painting and Vesuvius; seeing European painting at the National Gallery in London and the Dulwich Picture Gallery (24:00) — Political and social conflicts in 19th-century England; the class system and political reform; women’s suffrage; the wreck of the Amphitrite (A Disaster at Sea) (31:30) — The wide range of Turner’s patrons; painting a scene in Venice and a nocturne of coal barges being loaded (Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight) (38:00) — Viewing Turner: in person vs. online (43:15)

Paintings by J.M.W. Turner:

The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (c. 1834-35) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-burning-of-the-houses-of-parliament-d36235

Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (exh. 1842) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-snow-storm-steam-boat-off-a-harbours-mouth-n00530

The Thames above Waterloo Bridge (c. 1830-35) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-thames-above-waterloo-bridge-n01992

Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (c. 1805-06) https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31489/fall-of-the-rhine-at-schaffhausen

A Disaster at Sea (c. 1835) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-a-disaster-at-sea-n00558

Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835) https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1225.html

More about Czesław Miłosz: A California Life
https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/czeslaw-milosz-a-california-life/
https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/tag/czeslaw-milosz/

How the book originated (0:45) — The vatic tradition in Polish poetry (4:30) — Warsaw 1945 and “Dedication” (6:45) — Introducing Polish literature to California students (11:00) — Immersion in American literature and culture after 1945 (15:00) — Under surveillance by the U.S. government; defecting to the U.S.; Stalinism as “swallowing frogs” (17:30) — Being and becoming; poetry and philosophy; from Thomas Aquinas to James Fenimore Cooper (20:30) — The superhuman California landscape (24:30) — Transition from Poland to Berkeley and “Magic Mountain” (25:30) — The loss of “second space” and spiritual imagination (30:30) — A playful thinker, and “To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat’s Honor and Not Only” (34:00)

“Dedication” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49458/dedication
“A Magic Mountain” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49456/a-magic-mountain
“To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat’s Honor and Not Only” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/03/23/to-mrs-professor-in-defense-of-my-cats-honor-and-n/

Engaging skeptical audiences in a polarized age (1:30) — Two cheers for the Enlightenment, and the Stephen King-Lovecraftian vibes of New England (7:30) — Self-experimentation, and moderate deference to scientific consensus (12:15) — Giving science the right amount of authority (17:00) — When, and when not, to write from personal experience (19:30) — American Gnosticism, Emerson, Descartes, and the overwhelming desire to escape from the body when suffering from chronic illness (23:00) — Taking Marvel seriously (29:15) — The campus Left’s long-overdue challenge to the neoliberal-technocratic elite university (35:00) — Care, the humanities, & the bureaucracy (38:00) — The successes of urbanism in New Haven (42:00)

THE DEEP PLACES: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646761/the-deep-places-by-ross-douthat/

Ross Douthat at the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/column/ross-douthat

The Athenaeum Review podcast: http://athenaeumreview.org/podcasts/

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler speak about Flora, their exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, on view from September 5, 2021 to January 16, 2022.

https://www.themodern.org/exhibition/teresa-hubbard-alexander-birchler-flora
https://hubbardbirchler.net/works/flora/
https://hubbardbirchler.net/works/bust/

A conversation about the new film, John Wilcox: The Relinquishment of Time, with filmmakers Exploredinary (Sarah Reyes and Daniel Driensky) and Dr. David Wilcox, the artist's brother.

About the film: https://www.exploredinary.com/johnwilcox
About the artist John Wilcox: https://johnwilcoxart.com/

Winner of "Best Texas Film" at the 2021 Hill Country Film Festival in Fredericksburg.

Oct. 3, 2021 screening at Dallas VideoFest: https://www.facebook.com/events/597286891298995/
Oct. 28, 2021 screening on KERA's Frame of Mind: https://artandseek.org/2021/09/01/texas-film-fans-check-out-the-lineup-for-frame-of-mind-on-kera-tv/

Coming soon: screenings at the Lone Star Film Festival (November 2021) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

John Wilcox Art on Instagram
Exploredinary on Instagram

An interview with artist and gallerist David Quadrini, on the occasion of the exhibition "An Artists' Homage to the Dynamic Influence of Rick Brettell," curated by Greg Metz at SP/N Gallery, UT Dallas, Sept. 10 to Oct. 9, 2021.

https://calendar.utdallas.edu/event/art_exhibition_brettell_an_artistshomageto_the_dynamic_influence_of_rick_brettell

http://athenaeumreview.org/podcasts

Organic Worlds: Symbiogenesis in Art , curated by Dr. Charissa Terranova and featuring the work of Ken Rinaldo and Amy M. Youngs, is at the SP/N Gallery at UT Dallas from February 7 to April 28, 2026.

Lauren Brazeal, Matthew Baker and Rebecca Cai interview poet Roy G. Guzmán.

http://athenaeumreview.org/podcasts/

Shannon Schaffer and Thomas Rocha nterview Toni Jensen, author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land (Ballantine).

Our guest today is Chris Arnade, the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. He is a freelance writer and photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Guardian, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal among many others.

In this podcast:

What does “dignity” mean, and how do you recognize it when you see it? (1:30) — How the bureaucracy of “helping institutions” can have a bad effect on the people they are trying to serve (6:30) — What would be a better way for us to think about social issues in America? (11:30) — Growing up in small-town Florida, and views of the class structure in America (13:30) — What public policies do you think would help people who are struggling? (16:30) — Has writing this book changed your views on the role of religion? (20:30) — What America can learn from the virtues of El Paso and East L.A. (25:00) — Race, racism and the working class (30:00) — How do you approach the craft of photography? (33:30) — Techniques of storytelling: the influence of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez (37:30) — Alternatives to mainstream journalism: the interviews of Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich (44:00) — What are the ethics of interviewing people who are struggling? (46:00) — Has moving out of New York City affected your perspective? (48:30) — Observing American politics: Glenn Greenwald and The American Compass (51:30) –Fort Dodge, COVID at meatpacking plants , and truck stops in Missouri (55:15)

On this episode, we talk with Justin Shubow, President of the National Civic Art Society, about modernism and classicism, the profession of architecture and its role in civil society, public monuments in Washington, D.C., the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, and much more.

On the Eisenhower Memorial, and the role of the General Services Administration in Federal patronage of architecture, for example the Salt Lake City courthouse (2:00) — Is it affordable to build classically today? (8:00) — Can classicism be creative and innovative? (10:30) — Starchitects and expressionism (14:00) — Modernists against classicism: Harvard’s Joseph Hudnut critiques John Russell Pope’s Jefferson Memorial (17:00) — Philosophy, the Zeitgeist and architecture (19:30) — Roger Scruton, the vernacular and architecture (21:30) — Is there anything to learn from Las Vegas vernacular architecture? (25:00)

What are the institutional prospects for architectural classicism in America? (29:00) — Are modernism and classicism simply culturally relative phenomena, or can they somehow transcend their place and time? (34:30) — The virtues of the Chrysler Building and Art Deco, the last of the classical styles (40:00) — Classical architecture today: David M. Schwarz, Robert A. M. Stern, Allan Greenberg, Roman and Williams (42:00) — On Michael Oakeshott, rationalism and architecture (44:30) — Oakeshott’s political philosophy (50:00) — On philosophy and men’s clothing (53:30) — Joseph Shubow, and the beginnings of an interest in architecture and design (58:15)

Our guest on this podcast is Xiangdong Ji, project leader for the PandaX dark matter search collaboration in China’s JinPing Deep-Underground Lab in Sichuan, China, and Distinguished University Professor of physics at the University of Maryland. We discuss the history of the search for dark matter, and the beauty and simplicity of physics.

Our guest on this episode is Mark Roseman, the Pat M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany.

In Part One:

How did the members of the Bund come to be part of such a cohesive and tightly-knit group? (3:00) — The charismatic style of leadership, and how such groups declined after 1945 in Germany (5:15) — The tension between democratic and authoritarian aspects of leadership in social groups (7:00) — How can small-scale actions, such as bringing flowers to the victims of an attack, or sending packages to a displaced-persons camp, have any effect in the larger society? (9:00) — What is the importance of exercise, and physical fitness, for the formation of the group? (13:00) — Writing the history of the Wannsee Conference: What if a key document such as the Wannsee Protocol had not survived? (18:30) — How do you deal with the different kinds of language used by the Nazi government in its planning? Rhetorically violent, vs. bureaucratically euphemistic and evasive (22:30)

Our guest on this episode of the podcast is Nils Roemer, interim dean of the School of the Arts and Humanities, director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, and the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor in Holocaust Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Our guest on this episode is the poet, translator, and critic A. M. Juster, whose next book, Wonder and Wrath, will be published by Paul Dry Books in early 2021.

Our guest on this episode is Sean Valles, the author of Philosophy of Population Health.

Our guest on this podcast is Jacob Stegenga, the author of Care and Cure and Medical Nihilism. We discuss the effectiveness of medical interventions, the relationship between philosophers and practitioners, how to deal with complexity, the nature of sexual desire, and much more.

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, is published by W. W. Norton.

A conversation with Michele Hanlon, Associate Dean of the Arts at UT Dallas, about the transition to producing virtual events in spring 2020: https://www.utdallas.edu/ah/events/virtual-events.html

Our guest on this episode is Mark Roseman, the Pat M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany.

In This Episode:

How did the members of the Bund come to be part of such a cohesive and tightly-knit group? (3:00) — The charismatic style of leadership, and how such groups declined after 1945 in Germany (5:15) — The tension between democratic and authoritarian aspects of leadership in social groups (7:00) — How can small-scale actions, such as bringing flowers to the victims of an attack, or sending packages to a displaced-persons camp, have any effect in the larger society? (9:00) — What is the importance of exercise, and physical fitness, for the formation of the group? (13:00) — Writing the history of the Wannsee Conference: What if a key document such as the Wannsee Protocol had not survived? (18:30) — How do you deal with the different kinds of language used by the Nazi government in its planning? Rhetorically violent, vs. bureaucratically euphemistic and evasive (22:30)

Our guests on this episode of the podcast, here to discuss their exhibition Eddie Leon Returns, at the Reading Room in Dallas, are artists Linda and Ed Blackburn, and curator Caleb Bell.

In this episode: 

Curating Ray Madison (0:45) — Eddie Leon, the creation of the artist Ray Madison, a.k.a. Linda and Ed Blackburn (1:45) — The creative process (2:30) — The process of artistic collaboration (5:00) — The story of Eddie Leon (8:00) — The function of narrative: paintings vs. comic strips vs. cinema (10:45) — Pop Art vs. postmodernism (13:30) — Illusionism in comics (15:45) — Taking familiar subjects (TV cowboys, or the Bible) and making them unfamiliar (19:30) — From Berkeley to New York to Fort Worth (26:30) — Reflecting on the development of art in Fort Worth (29:00) — Finding the dramatic and narrative elements in the subject of a painting (33:30) — The decision-making process in creative art (38:30) — Linda Blackburn’s Western paintings (41:00) — Ed Blackburn’s e-mail paintings (42:00)

Our guest on this episode is Ambassador Jorge Alberto Lozoya, the inaugural director of the International Museum of the Baroque in Puebla, Mexico.

In Part 1:

Does the return of the baroque in contemporary culture imply a cyclical, as opposed to linear, concept of history? Asian vs. European ideas of history (2:15) — Trans-Pacific trade from the Manila galleon to the present (5:30) — The peculiar Western fascination with individual artists and writers (8:00) — Regional varieties of the baroque: Puebla vs. Spain and Italy (11:45) — Bishop Palafox and the Biblioteca Palafoxiana (13:00) — Similarities between Mexican and Southeast Asian styles (14:45) — Catholicism in Asia (17:00 — Taking the Greyhound bus from Mexico City to New York, aged fifteen (18:30) and resolving to become a diplomat (20:30)

In Part 2:

How would you respond to someone who criticizes globalization as merely a kind of “Yankee imperialism”? (0:25) — How Russian visits to Western supermarkets led to the downfall of the Soviet empire (5:05) — The 21st-century return of religion: Hungary, Brazil, Mexico (8:00) — Cervantes, Shakespeare, Mozart: a universal culture (13:15) —  Cosmopolitan dialogues: Gabriel Orozco, Octavio Paz, Sor Juana (17:30) —  What should people in the U.S. read to better understand Mexico? (20:30) — What to do after retiring from a long and distinguished career (24:00)