The Lie of Beauty: Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’

The artist David Wojnarowicz recalls, in a 1989 essay he wrote after his HIV diagnosis, a time he spent ‘standing in the mountains of a small city in New Mexico’, experiencing ‘a sudden and intense feeling of rage looking at those…

‘The Art of Fame’: From Oscar Wilde to Lady Gaga

‘Fame’ as an artwork. Is this even a thing? Well, no. Not technically. In the canonical framework of 20th century art-history, it’s never really been raised as a legitimate artistic strategy, though it’s definitely alluded to in a lot of the…

Some Girls are Bigger Than Others: On Writing Fatness

‘Some girls are bigger than others
Some girls are bigger than others
Some girls’ mothers are bigger than
Other girls’ mothers’

Doubled Forging, or, Araki Yasusada and Why the West Wants Poems

To begin with, a story. Because, for us, here, the story is the important part.

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In late 1945, as the Allied powers began self-assuredly to map the contours of a new…

Framing Son of Saul

All art since the Shoah has been ethically contested, and art taking the Holocaust as its object occupies uniquely unstable ground. Films daring to depict it have attracted condemnation at least since Jacques Rivette’s 1961 essay ‘On Abjection’ — a piece with which the filmmaker and sometime…

The Milk Fetish

In December 2014 Coca-Cola launched their latest product, Milka-Cola or ‘Fairlife’. Sandy Douglas, Coke’s global chief customer officer, speaking at a Morgan Stanley investment conference, announced Fairlife as ‘a milk that’s premiumised and tastes better and we’ll charge twice as much for it as the…

Elena Ferrante, Zadie Smith, and the Politics of Feminine (In)Visibility

Look at me / (don’t look at me) / Look at me / (don’t look at me) / Look at me don’t look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me don’t / look / (Look) / (Don’t look) / I can’t stand it if you don’t…