Leafing through the fall issue of Art in America, a brief note caught my attention: the publication’s response to a complaint from an art curator at a prestigious museum, who argued that, however impressive his credentials might appear, his working life was little short of a sentence.

I had the opportunity to read, in the latest issue of The Critic, an article on Sancta, the most recent work by Austrian choreographer and director Florentina Holzinger, one of the most radical figures in the contemporary European scene. It takes as its point of departure Sancta Susanna (1921–22) by Paul Hindemith—already scandalous in its time—and expands it into a hybrid scene somewhere between opera, performance, concert, and a ritual of quasi-satanic affiliation.

Science is beginning to entertain the idea that human hypocrisy may derive directly from primates. Knowing this does not make it better or worse, but it is worth keeping in mind that the brain arrives already equipped for it.
Facial expressions sit at the very center of social life, and yet scientists still do not fully understand how the brain produces them.

I cannot quite understand how Facebook’s algorithm works. For some reason, it has begun feeding me dozens of images of Ana de Armas. Perhaps because one day I lingered on a photograph of Anya Taylor-Joy; perhaps because I keep an archive—strictly for scientific purposes—of Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe; perhaps, in short, because I paused one second too long over a few of her images.

On my way home, on one of the trains at Miami Airport, I took this photograph. A passenger had left a sticker on one of the metal poles inside the carriage. Whoever it was—judging by the code—came from Guayaquil and carried it on their suitcase. The author, it would seem, now lives on these shores.

For a very long time, the overhandled story of Numantia has occupied a central place in the repertoire of national political rhetoric. It is cited in such a reduced, schematic way that it borders on the grotesque. The citadel stood on a hill slightly over one kilometer above sea level. At its foot lies today the village of Garray, barely sixty meters lower—modern, pragmatic.

In Sapiens (From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind), the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari advances a disturbing yet lucid idea about the function of empires in history: imperial systems are neither pure evil nor pure progress. They conquer, repress, dominate, and exploit—but they also weave global networks: routes, rules, currencies, lingua francas, infrastructure, commercial circuits, the circulation of technologies and ideas, culture, art, and knowledge.

Watching the American Alex Honnold perched on the skyscraper tower in Taipei—508 meters high—immediately carried me to the image of King Kong. With one difference: the latter has an intellectual author, the filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who directed the original 1933 film alongside Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO Radio Pictures...

Perhaps since the beginning of time, yet within the landscape of contemporary visual culture, polemic, interpellation, and reply operate as devices of symbolic production that act directly upon the processes of meaning and the circulation of images. These controversies, or provocations—beyond merely situating themselves within a context that already shapes the imago—become structuring agents that reconfigure spaces of reading...