Athenaeum Review

Franklin Einspruch is the editor of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art, by Walter Darby Bannard, and the proprietor of Dissident Muse Journal.

In this conversation: Why the aphorism?; the significance of abstract art and of Clement Greenberg; the place of commitment in art; how to teach art; the relationship between creativity, intuition, imagination, and habit; the practice of art criticism; and more!

Erika Doss is the author of Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (University of Chicago Press).

In this conversation: why art historians have often neglected the intersection of art and faith in modernism; the fluidity of religion in modernity; modern artists vs. religious artists; comparing Christian Science, Bahá’í, occultism, and Byzantine Catholicism; dominant and marginal American identities; and more!

Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University, with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty, is the author of Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame, 2022). The journal Modern Theology recently devoted a forum to this book, with contributions from Cyril O'Regan, Kevin Hart, William Desmond, Ben Quash, and Anne M. Carpenter, and a response by the author.

In this conversation: The path from Minding the Modern to Incomprehensible Certainty; what is an image?; which figures were included in the book (and which were not but might have been); how the Renaissance and Baroque periods fit into the book's argument; the problem of disciplinarity and specialization; phenomenology in contrast to other critical theories; the relevance of Gerschom Scholem's Walter Benjamin; and more!

Gary Saul Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He is the author of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press).

In this episode: How Russian literature differs from English or French literature; contrasting the 19th and 20th centuries; the role of revolutionary violence; the importance of small moments in shaping history; translation recommendations; suggestions on short Russian novels; and more!

Maryann Corbett's translations of three ballades by Christine de Pizan appear in the Winter 2024 issue of Athenaeum Review.

In this conversation: The poet's life and times amidst the Hundred Years' War, the Western Schism and the execution of Joan of Arc; the literary debate on the rights of women; the poet's representation of courtly love; the ballade as a poetic form; and much more!

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan University Press, 2023). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Dark Horse, the New Statesman, the Hopkins Review online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her poetry has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award; has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Poetry Foundation website; and was included in The Best American Poetry 2018. New work is forthcoming in Raritan, Image, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

Christine de Pizan (1364-c. 1430) was the author of The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, among many other works.

Brian Allen, a senior fellow at National Review Institute and National Review’s art critic, is an art historian living in Arlington, Vermont and a frequent contributor to Athenaeum Review.

In this conversation: the transition from museum director to full-time art critic; the state of art criticism and the value of diverse points of view; how to cultivate a critical perspective; the state of art museums in America; curatorial trends in 2024; and more!

Bill Kristol is director of ⁠Defending Democracy Together⁠, editor at large of ⁠The Bulwark⁠, and the host of ⁠Conversations with Bill Kristol⁠.

In this conversation: moving from academia to Washington, D.C.; changing perspectives over the course of a career in politics; the successes and failures of American conservatism; the most insightful political observers today; what to learn from the most successful political figures; liberalism vs. populism, and more!

Micah Mattix is Professor of English at Regent University and the editor of the Prufrock newsletter on Substack. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, National Review, and The New Criterion, and was appointed poetry editor at First Things in 2021.

In this conversation: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, ten years of Prufrock; the state of literary criticism and of literary publishing; reflections on teaching poetry; advice to students and young poets; and more!

"A Brief History of Emergence," by Frederick Turner, Robert Stern, and Roger F. Malina, appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Athenaeum Review.

In this podcast: Why is emergence important in complex systems? How is emergence important for physics, for geophysics and for the arts? What is an emergent university? How is emergent research conducted? Discussion of the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, time, evolution, and being.

See also:

"Emergence: A chaotic system pushed into organization" (YouTube/UTD Geoscience Studio)

"Henri Bergson on why the existence of things precedes their possibility" (Aeon)

Physics of Emergence and Organization (ed. Licata & Sakaji)

Jason Andrew is the founding partner at Artist Estate Studio, LLC, the entity that manages the estates of Jack Tworkov and Elizabeth Murray among others. Over the past 20 years, he has organized historic exhibitions and published extensively on the life and work of Jack Tworkov. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

 Midori Yamamura, Ph.D., is the Alcaly/Bodian Distinguished CUNY Scholar,  the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC), The CUNY Graduate Center and the Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art at CUNY Kingsborough. She is the author of "Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular” (MIT Press, 2015) and Co-Editor and a contributor to "Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial