“The Wyeth saga began with N.C.: a maverick unimpressed by his industrializing world who became infatuated instead with adventure, romance, and old America––back when the connection between humanity and nature was more immediate.”
“But both in spite and because of this ubiquity, “Stairway to Heaven” gets a little slept on, relegated to the status of “rock classic” and thought of as a song more to be heard than to be enjoyed.”
“House of Sugar takes us to these places, into the real labyrinths of drug addiction, the landscapes and dreamscapes where the whole thing actually goes down.”
“Lil Peep’s ghostly vocals float drowsily over maximalist emo-trap beats without drowning in them…leaving us with a taste of what might have been: the soaring emotional heights to which rap, the most notoriously heartless genre, almost rose.”
“A museum setting might sterilize the dread of the inevitable ending at which any chronological exhibit explicitly in conversation with environmentalism must arrive. But the accessibility of this juxtaposition right up front makes sure one is clued into that inevitability and made to feel it violently.”
“Walking through French Baroque palaces-turned-museums and pushing through crowds at the New York Met is a traditional, storied cultural method of viewing Great Masters hanging in gilded frames on the walls. Walking into the Monet room at the Chichu Art Museum in Naoshima, Japan, however, is more like visiting a shrine.”
“Perhaps we must accept that we are simply watchers of beautiful forms. And if we acknowledge that we are observers, bound by our own frailties and limitations, we may be able to rescue the memory of what was, for an instant, exquisite.”
