Tag: art

Jean Raoux, Pygmalion Adoring His Statue, 1717

6,135 words

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) are both concerned with love and the ideal. If you love cinema, you will love these films, which I would rank among the greatest ever made. They can teach us a lot about love, idealism, art, and different sorts of desire. Be advised that there are a great many spoilers ahead.

Vertigo is the story of John “Scottie” Ferguson (played by James Stewart), a San Francisco policeman who retires from the force after a deadly rooftop chase leaves him with severe acrophobia (fear of heights). (more…)

4,106 words

Gore Vidal once said to Dwight McDonald, “You realize we have nothing more to say; only to add.”

I feel the same way in this review of Todd Field’s Tár, the recent film so artfully described in Trevor Lynch’s review (“The Talented Miss Tarr”), but the film made an immediate impression on me in terms of how it dealt with life and power when applied to art. I recall Lynch’s discomfort with Tár’s opening monologues which could, by virtue of their length and the fact of there being two in sequence, could easily kill a film. (more…)

Horus the Avenger

4,380 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Tim Murdock: If I had a friend who had an alternative view from what I have, I have plenty of friends with obscure views on various different things that I don’t necessarily agree with, or don’t coincide with my view, per se. (more…)

6,288 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

The following is a transcript of Charles Krafft‘s interview with Tim Murdock, aka Horus the Avenger, on EndGame Exotica at White Rabbit Radio. The interview was originally broadcast on January 30, 2015. We would like to thank Hyacinth Bouquet for the transcript. (more…)

3,643 words

Much could be said about Laibach (and has been, here at Counter-Currents). The name is the German form of Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital city. The language choice references their Austro-Hungarian past, and depending on who you ask, maybe some other era, too. Their sound is one of a kind, as unique as that of Laure LePrunenec. Laibach is best described as an industrial band with heavy martial and totalitarian influences. One notable characteristic of their unique presentation is walking a tightrope between fascist aesthetics and socialist realism. (more…)

2,757 words

A chronic problem with the arts and politics is that explicitly political art is often not the best art, regardless of the message. Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has noted that novels which are written with the intention of delivering a pro-white message are generally not very good. We see a similar problem in contemporary films, where the obsession with delivering a “woke” message recently created a movie so terrible that it was cancelled after filming was complete. (more…)

1,411 words

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently staging an exhibition entitled “The African Origin of Civilization.” Inspired by Cheikh Anta Diop’s eponymous book, one of Afrocentrism’s central texts, it juxtaposes African artifacts dating mostly from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries with ancient Egyptian artifacts. (more…)

4,333 words

Anthony Bavaria is one of the youngest writers on our site. Readers know him primarily for his hilarious reviews of our own as well as mainstream literature. Anthony is a thoughtful intellectual and has great insight into art, travel, the direction of our civilization, and literature. I was honored to talk with him about his writing, contemporary dissident artists, his personal experiences, and his tastes.

You are relatively young. Could you introduce yourself to our readers? (more…)

Salvador Dalí, Perpignan Train Station

5,557 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

With Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity, Dalí returned to his paranoiac-critical concerns (i.e., autoeroticism), but now transformed. The paranoiac origin is Dalí’s obsession with Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, which in turn he believed to “consist” in rhinoceroses’ horns. (more…)

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory

5,672 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

This excursus has prematurely broached The Gala Situation, so let’s go back to where we started, with Dalí beginning to apply his method: “For the next few years Dalí’s paranoiac process remained preoccupied with fetishist obsessions, including masturbation and his fear of heterosexual sex.”[1] (more…)

6,241 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Christopher Heath Brown, Jean-Pierre Isbouts
The Dalí Legacy: How an Eccentric Genius Changed the Art World and Created a Lasting Legacy
Apollo Publishers, 2021

“The only difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist.” — Salvador Dalí (more…)

Philippe Halsman photographs Salvador Dalí, Decline of Hair on the Face, 1954.

1,741 words

It’s the most basic thing in the world: You can look at a rock, think it’s a bear, and run away. Or you can glimpse a bear, assume it’s a rock, and get eaten. Over time, evolution will select for seeing bears, when in fact, 99 times out of 100, it’s just rocks. Then clever fools will come and say that believing in a bear infestation is primitive superstition, and that they, taught by “science” and “logic,” have surmised that there are no bears among the rocks. In fact, bears do not even exist. (more…)