CULTURE: 2026-05-29

by | May 29, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-05-29

Ideas in Circulation

The Duchamp problem: is the readymade exhausted or inexhaustible?

Fifty years of ubiquity has not settled the question of what Marcel Duchamp actually bequeathed to art — and a major MoMA retrospective is forcing the argument again.

Foster’s LRB piece argues that the best cure for Duchamp fatigue is a large dose of the real thing — implying the problem is not Duchamp but his epigones. Read alongside his Paris Review column on Alberto Burri’s burlap works (material that carries war, poverty, and use rather than ironic detachment), the juxtaposition raises a pointed question: what happens to the readymade when the material already bleeds? The two pieces, appearing simultaneously, amount to an informal argument about whether the 20th century’s most imitated gesture has any critical force left, or whether it now functions mainly as a license for vacancy.

The Enlightenment under pressure from both flanks

Aeon publishes a serious defense of Enlightenment values at a moment when the concept is being weaponized by the right and abandoned by parts of the left.

Eliane Glaser’s Aeon essay argues that the Enlightenment can only be defended by practicing its core method — permanent self-critique — rather than treating it as a fixed heritage to be guarded. The LRB’s Afinogenov piece on Russian ideology arrives from the opposite direction: he traces how Putin’s eschatological militarism explicitly positions itself against Enlightenment universalism, constructing a Slavic civilizational alternative that has no articulated manifesto but is coherent enough to function as one. Together they map a contest that is not primarily academic.

The university as ideological casualty

Stefan Collini’s LRB essay on British higher education makes a structural argument that goes well beyond the familiar student-debt complaint, and it arrives as pressure on institutions intensifies on multiple fronts.

Collini’s essay argues that the British loan system has restructured not just university finances but the premises under which universities understand themselves — students as consumers, knowledge as credentialing, administrators as managers of brand risk. The NYT piece on Lonnie Bunch at the Smithsonian under White House pressure maps the same dynamic in a different register: what happens to institutions of cultural knowledge when political actors treat them as captured territory rather than public goods. The comparison is imprecise but illuminating.

Scoring, games, and the capture of value

David Runciman’s LRB essay uses games and scoring systems as a lens for understanding how any metric becomes a target once powerful interests notice it.

This is a single-source item that earns its place on its own terms. Runciman’s argument is dialectical rather than polemical: scoring systems are liberating and oppressive for the same reason — the rules are the game. What makes this relevant beyond games is the obvious extension to metrics in education, platform algorithms, and institutional assessment. The essay is compressed and does more thinking per paragraph than most full-length books on the subject.

Performance, identity, and the social-media update of classic drama

Two sources are circling a Kip Williams production of Genet’s The Maids that rewrites the play’s class and identity anxieties through a social-media lens — and one of them finds the update insufficient.

Helen Shaw’s review makes the argument worth attending to: the production knows what it wants to say (internet=performance=alienated self) but Genet’s original is already about that, and more savagely. The comparison reveals something about the current theatrical moment — directors reaching for digital metaphors to make canonical texts feel urgent, and sometimes flattening rather than sharpening what was already there.

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Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Backrooms — Kane Parsons’s A24 debut, at 20, expands his viral horror web series into a feature about memory and unreality; the Guardian calls it genuinely disturbing and genre-rewriting, the NYT finds it thin — the divergence itself is worth noting.

The Currents — Milagros Mumenthaler’s Argentine film about destabilization, sensuously realized and largely underseen among this week’s releases.

Forastera — A first feature set on Mallorca in which a teenager begins inhabiting traces of her dead grandmother; beguiling and formally precise.

Firelei Báez at Hauser & Wirth — Dominican painter retooling historical graphics — maps, archival images — to redistribute what they encode; the NYT piece is the main notice but the work it describes is serious.

The Hill by Harriet Clark — Twenty years in the writing, a novel about incarceration and what it means to be bound to others; the Paris Review interview with Lidija Haas is the best introduction to why it matters.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix win at Cannes — The exiled Russian director used his award to address Putin directly and publicly; the cultural-political resonance of this is not separable from the work.

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Essays Worth the Read

Artist of sympathy and cruelty

Dorian Bandy’s Aeon essay argues that Mozart’s genius was specifically ethical rather than purely musical — that he wrote music powerful enough to drag audiences into genuine moral predicaments rather than aesthetic ones. The claim is not that Mozart was a moralist but that the operas are structured as tests, and that failing them is part of the experience. Worth reading against any tendency to treat musical form as politically neutral.

Animal, Vegetable, Lamb: The Zoophyte from Tartary

Thom Sliwowski’s Public Domain Review essay traces the medieval European legend of a half-animal, half-plant creature through its possible origins — mistaken cotton, fern rhizomes, euphemism for culled fetal lambs — and uses the uncertainty productively. The essay is ostensibly about a hoax, but it becomes an argument about how categories of the natural harden into certainty and how anomalies get domesticated. Precise and strange.

Gen Z but two centuries ago

Emily Herring’s essay on the mal du siècle — the early 19th-century French condition of “full hearts in an empty world” — makes the historical comparison to contemporary youth malaise without forcing it. The point is not that nothing changes but that the specific shape of post-revolutionary disillusionment has recurred, and understanding its earlier form clarifies what is structural and what is contingent in the current one.

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One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Stefan Collini: Squadrons of Pigs

Collini’s essay on British universities is the most substantive piece in this week’s sources because it refuses the terms of the existing debate. The student-loan system is not merely unfair to students; it has transformed what a university believes itself to be, who it thinks it serves, and what counts as success within it. The argument that political and media discussion remains “wilfully superficial” is supported rather than merely asserted. Readers outside the UK will find the analysis maps onto any system where knowledge institutions have been restructured by market logic — which is most of them.