The Felt Room and the Expanded Definition You walk into a room and the air is wrong. Not wrong in the way of a broken

The Visceral Encounter With Political Art You are standing in a room you did not expect to feel anything in. The painting is large —

The Critic as Cultural Authority You are standing in a gallery in London, 1910, and you do not know what you are looking at. The

The Peripheral Imagination: Abruzzo as a Mirror of Italian Self-Deception You are standing in a village square in the interior of Abruzzo, somewhere between Sulmona

The Roots of Ecological Consciousness in Modern Art You are standing in a gallery sometime in the early 1970s, and on the wall in front

The Dissolution of the Frame: Fluxus and the Abolition of Aesthetic Distance You are standing in a gallery, and you know you are standing in

The Object Refuses Its Function You walk into a gallery and stop. Not because something has caught your eye, but because nothing has — and

The Wound as Artistic Medium You are sitting in a gallery in Düsseldorf sometime in the late 1960s, and a man wrapped in felt is

The Prehistory of Influence: Persuasion Before the Feed You are already performing for someone, right now, even if the room is empty. The internal audience

The Performed Self You spent forty minutes choosing the photograph. Not because the others were bad — some were better, technically — but because this

The Staged Self: Performance as Social Survival You spend four minutes choosing between two nearly identical photographs of yourself. In both, you are standing in

The Founding Ambiguity of Proximity You are standing at a fence, or a cage, or simply at the edge of a field, and the animal