Forthright expression; affect. May be alloyed with irony, depending on the context. One of the key modalities of the metamodern.
What if I want to compose something that is simply beautiful? Am I allowed to do this, or will this act result in my being regarded as a composer who simply wants to please the listener, instead of one that articulates and tries to solve particular problems, musical or otherwise, through his or her music? …
Abigail Ann Schwarz experiences Shia LaBeouf’s #IAMSORRY performance exhibit in Los Angeles and the surrounding media coverage.
Postmodernism announced the death of the subject, but recent developments in literature, philosophy and political agency suggest that it is alive and kicking as ever. Not in form of the modern Cartesian ego though and also not in denial of all the subjectivity-disrupting forces that postmodern theory pointed out. It returns with a great leap …
Under postmodernism, cyberspace served as the most prominent cultural example of the sublime. Today, however, the concept of opacity has emerged which negates the corrosive effect of web links, providing a way “out” of the otherwise never-ending link labyrinth. Moreover, this opacity provides us with a notion that negotiates between beauty and sublimity – the …
Time Magazine once described the first ten years of the new millennium as the decade from hell – a decade littered with wars and terror attacks, natural catastrophes and economic crises. The resulting sense of dread, pessimism and despair seemed to be reflected by the seemingly endless parade of antiheroes and sociopaths, drug dealers and murderers, self-centred egomaniacs and …
I have previously written on this site about the ‘quirky’ cinematic sensibility, which is represented most clearly in the kinds of millennial and post-millennial American indie comedies and comedy-dramas brought to mind by names and titles such as Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Jared Hess, Miranda July, Buffalo ’66, Punch-Drunk Love, I …
