By posting paintings like “American Progress,” the DHS signals its white supremacist beliefs.
Ed Simon
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for LitHub, and the author of Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (2024).
Posted inFeatures
Bidding Adieu to Art Deco’s Democratic Dream
A century later, the decline of the movement represents the death of the grand designs it traded in.
Posted inOpinion
Donald Trump’s Cultural Revolution
The difference between this revolution and those in Germany, China, or Iran, is not of kind, but of degree, and only so far.
Posted inOpinion
Pope Francis’s Aesthetics of Humility
He chose a simple white cassock over velvet robes, disseminated photos of him kneeling before inmates and refugees, and believed in art as an intrinsic human right.
Posted inArt
Clara Peeters’s Still Lifes Are Even Better Than the Real Thing
In her paintings, the 17th-century Dutch painter captured a pure, crystalline moment of time with unnerving verisimilitude.
Posted inArt
A Glimpse of Eternity at the Carnegie Museum’s Hall of Architecture
The assembling of these plaster casts of masterpieces more than a century ago must be understood as a work of art in its own right, a bizarre and beautiful triumph.
Posted inArt
Gertrude Abercrombie’s American Surrealism
Feted as the “Queen of the Bohemians,” Abercrombie saw herself as a kind of jazz witch forging dream visions into a strange, eerie, and occult body of work.
Posted inOpinion
Donald Trump Brings Back “Degenerate Art”
The president’s obsession with cultural control is evidence of a continued fascist creep, and not just another joke exercise in narcissism.
Posted inBook Review
Julia Warhola Was an Artist in Her Own Right
The calligrapher, illustrator, and mother to Andy Warhol lived with her son in New York City for decades, supporting and even collaborating with him on artistic projects.
Posted inOpinion
How Los Angeles Created the Vocabulary of Its Destruction
The burning of large areas in the city suggests the dusk of America as a dream manufacturer, and the beginnings of a darker story.
Posted inArt
The Artist Who Ushered Us From Medieval to Modern
Jacopo Ligozzi gave visual expression to the developing myth of empirical objectivity, of being able to successfully collect, measure, analyze, and categorize.
Posted inOpinion
The Canonization of St. Luigi
The authorities inadvertently transformed a perp walk photo of the accused killer of a healthcare CEO into a Renaissance painting of the arrest of Christ.