Latest News: Posts Tagged ‘Simon Critchley’

“In Bowie I hear a voice crying in the wilderness.” SIMON CRITCHLEY interviewed by Guernica

Friday, January 22nd, 2016

In Bowie I hear a voice crying in the wilderness. Really. He is this plaintive voice which feels radically alone, commanded by a black star. That’s what’s coming for all of us, and that’s the sign that hovers over all of Bowie’s work. It’s only when that black sun of melancholy and depression is exerting its force most strongly that the counter movement could be felt. That is the apparent paradox of his work.

To read the rest of the review, visit Guernica.

A ” remarkable, slim tribute volume to Bowie” Vanity Fair praises BOWIE

Friday, January 15th, 2016

To read the full article, visit Vanity Fair.

On ARTINFO, SIMON CRITCHLEY explains how we might understand Bowie’s body of work

Thursday, January 14th, 2016

I want to say something contradictory here. On the one hand Bowie has to be understood in a tradition of musical theater, which I think is Brechtian, and has to be understood in a tradition of contemporary art. I think Bowie should be spoken of in the same breath as Marcel Duchamp. And he worked in all these different media, and his influence is incalculable across all these domains. All of this is true. But if all of that existed, if all of that artifice existed without the songs, we wouldn’t be talking about him now. He was good at all these different things, but he was really, really good at making songs. And it’s those songs that stand up, and they form a coherent body of work for a number of reasons. But maybe it’s just because they’re really good [laughs]. They’re able to register with people in this incredibly powerful way. His fate was to be a pop star because that was the medium in which he could work in that particular historical period. If he was around now who knows what he might be.

To read the rest of the article, visit ARTINFO.

SIMON CRITCHLEY explains David Bowie’s politics on Politico

Thursday, January 14th, 2016

You can’t really identify Bowie with an obvious, normal political position—he didn’t support the Conservative Party or Labour Party as far as I am aware, but I think the way he saw it was that there was something about art, and particularly pop music, that had insurrectionary quality and could question and bring down authority. For him, music was a political tool or could be used as a political tool to question forms of political and theological authority.

To read the rest of the article, visit Politico.

SIMON CRITCHLEY joins Ben Ratliff on the New York Times Popcast to remember Bowie

Wednesday, January 13th, 2016

To listen to the segment, visit The New York Times.

“Concealed in Bowie’s often dystopian words is an appeal to utopia” SIMON CRITCHLEY highlights the life-affirming message at the core of Bowie’s work on the New York Times

Tuesday, January 12th, 2016

Concealed in Bowie’s often dystopian words is an appeal to utopia, to the possible transformation not just of who we are, but of where we are. Bowie, for me, belongs to the best of a utopian aesthetic tradition that longs for a “yes” within the cramped, petty relentless “no” of Englishness. What his music yearned for and allowed us to imagine were new forms of being together, new intensities of desire and love in keener visions and sharper sounds.

To read the rest of the article, visit The New York Times.

SIMON CRITCHLEY discusses BOWIE on SiriusXM’s “Sit Down”

Monday, January 11th, 2016

SiriusXM subscribers can listen to the full segment through SiriusXM On Demand.

“Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down” Read an excerpt of SIMON CRITCHLEY‘s BOWIE on The New Republic

Monday, January 11th, 2016

Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion. Bowie’s world is like a dystopian version of The Truman Show, the sick place of the world that is forcefully expressed in the ruined, violent cityscapes of “Aladdin Sane” and “Diamond Dogs” and, more subtly, in the desolate soundscapes of “Warszawa” and “Neuköln.” To borrow Iggy Pop’s idiom from Lust for Life (itself borrowed from Antonioni’s 1975 movie, although Bowie might well be its implicit referent), Bowie is the passenger who rides through the city’s ripped backside, under a bright and hollow sky.

To read the rest of the excerpt, visit The New Republic.

Last Word praises BOWIE

Thursday, March 19th, 2015

This book isn’t a roadmap, its a window… one I am quite glad to have gotten to peer into.

To read the rest of the review, visit Last Word

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