New Criticals

“This song is for Eric and for all those from Russia to America and around the globe who suffer from state terror — killed, choked, perished because of war and state-sponsored violence of all kinds — for political prisoners and those on the streets fighting for change,” Ms. Alyokhina and Ms. Tolokonnikova said in a statement, adding that they stand in solidarity. “We’ve known, on our own skin, what police brutality feels like and we can’t be silent on this issue.”

Melena Ryzik in Pussy Riot Releases ‘I Can’t Breathe,’ a Protest Song for Eric Garner

"There is a lack of a fundamental pricing model for art. Aside from the psychic pleasure art produces, there is no clear income stream that flows from art. Other assets have both an income stream as well as a potential capital gain. Stocks provide dividends, bonds provide coupon payments, and real estate can generate rent. Art, in some ways, is closer to gold. But at the same time art is less liquid and less homogenous than gold. Copper is copper. Gold is gold. A share of Apple or GM is always the same. Meanwhile, not only is one piece of art not the same as another, but there are even different measuring standards for the same artist depending on the medium - drawings versus paintings, for example - and at what point in the artist's career the work was created."

Nouriel Roubini in Why Art Is an Asset Class

"Radical confessions, like the one I have attempted here, are perhaps the only programmatic antidote to ideological slippage that threatens to turn us into cogs of the machine. If we are to forge alliances with our political adversaries we must avoid becoming like the socialists who failed to change the world but succeeded in improving their private circumstances. The trick is to avoid the revolutionary maximalism that, in the end, helps the neoliberals bypass all opposition to their self-defeating policies and to retain in our sights capitalism’s inherent failures while trying to save it, for strategic purposes, from itself."

Yanis Varoufakis in How I became an erratic Marxist

"The skit alerts us to a shared trait that we may not have noticed until presented with it. But this is not the mild Jerry Seinfeldesque communality of coffee-drinking and airplane etiquette. It concerns the communality of race, about which we are rarely allowed to laugh."

Zadie Smith in Brother From Another Mother

"Each time a photo is uploaded to the site, it loses some quality—but the effect isn't really obvious the first time, or the second time, or even the third time around. 90 screenshots and reposts later, however, the resulting blob of desaturated image artefacts is a stark visual representation of just how limited technology can be."

Beckett Mufson in This Is What Happens When You Repost an Instagram Photo 90 Times