September 30, 2024

Santiago Zabala on The Greatest Emergency

An Exhibition Based on Why Only Art Can Save Us

Seven years after the publication of Santiago Zabala’s Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency, the prestigious cultural institution Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid will host an exhibition based on Zabala’s aesthetic theory. The...

May 29, 2024

Eye of the Beholder:

Perception of Art and the Brain

Eric R. Kandel

Art is not complete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer—that is, without our response to it. As a neuroscientist and a lover of art, I am fascinated by this response, which results from the interaction of two...

April 24, 2024

Virginia Hanusik on Into the Quiet and the Light

Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana offers a glimpse into the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry....

March 1, 2024

Wendy Steiner on The Beauty of Choice

In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as...

February 21, 2024

Q&A: Najha Zigbi-Johnson on Mapping Malcolm

Mapping Malcolm is a collection of essays, conversations, and works of art that reinscribes Malcolm X’s memory and legacy across the built environment, forms of contemporary community building, and Black freedom movements as they continue to manifest across New York...

February 7, 2024

Black Life in a Nazi Internment Camp:

The Art of Josef Nassy

Sarah Phillips Casteel

In July 1947, an exhibition of artworks created in Nazi concentration and internment camps was mounted in railway cars stationed in Brussels’s Gare du Nord. Included in the exhibition were several works by Josef Nassy, an artist from the Dutch...

October 24, 2022

How Should We Approach Black Literature and Art Now?

John Brooks

In the United States, there’s a tendency to assume that Black literature and art are valuable primarily because they’re pedagogical, as if Black creative expression exists first and foremost to educate racist whites. This approach may be well meaning, but...

August 9, 2022

Writing Through Multiple Alienation

Chiara Cappelletto

Embodying Art has been an experiment in thinking on paper through self-alienation. Starting from Samuel Fleck’s draft translation of my Neuroestetica, published in Italian a decade ago, I had originally planned to update, expand, and substantially revamp the text while...

May 12, 2021

Eight or Nine Things to Know About Universities and Their Media

By Reinhold Martin

Ever since Pliny the Elder included a table of contents in his thirty-seven-volume Natural History as a shortcut for Vespasian Caesar, to whom that work was dedicated, the device has proved invaluable to readers with even less time on their...

October 21, 2020

New From Columbia Books on Architecture and the City! Paths to Prison

Our weekly list of new books is now available! Columbia Books on Architecture and the City Paths to Prison On the Architectures of Carcerality Edited by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt The collected essays in this book implicate architecture in the more longstanding...

October 14, 2020

Santiago Zabala responds to Ivelise Perniola review of Why Only Art Can Save Us

“Zabala’s extraordinary book strikes at the very heart of our spiritual predicament. From austerity politics to security measures, everything is legitimized with the axiom that we live in a state of emergency. The first task of the critique of ideology...

July 24, 2020

Book Excerpt! Design With Nature Now

“This exceptional book presents the enduring wisdom of Ian McHarg to a new generation. His insights, freshly interpreted in the pages of landscape designs and drawings, give me hope for the future of our planet.” ~Bruce Babbitt, Former U.S. Secretary...