The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the embodiment of the idea of individuality and, ultimately, human dignity. However, detaching ourselves from the aura—thus also from the promise associated with this figure—we see a strange, even dark question emerging. What if this promise can't be kept, and what if we’re now confronting the figure of the failed artist? This is a thought that the American philosopher Eric Hoffer made, in the early 1950s, the core of his work The True Believer – in which he argues that totalitarianism, as it raged in its Nazi and Stalinist varieties, could first and foremost be counted as failed artists. And this is precisely the idea of artist Megan Gafford, who sees the disappearance of beauty—exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's urinal—as one of the great catastrophes of the last century. Because what art denies itself seeks refuge in political activism. Since Megan Gafford, who taught design and drawing at the University of Denver and has been teaching at the University of Boulder for more than a decade, has been able to observe this logic of mobilization at close range, she's emerged as a journalistic voice with this idea, writing for magazines such as Quillette, Areo, and Tilt West.

Megan Gafford is an artist who lives and teaches in New York. Her interest in science and technology drives her artwork's strange sense of uncanniness. In her studio practice, she repurposes unsettling scientific tools like radiation and cybernetics as art materials, to create work that commingles eeriness and elegance. She also has a Substack blog called Fashionably Late Takes.

Recent Articles:

The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty. In Quillette

and Megan Gafford recommends

Samuel Hughes: The Beauty of Concrete

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Imagining the Boomer world straying into suffocating moralism during the Pop Revolution would have seemed like a grotesque, if not outright ridiculous, mind game. Actually, it is a first-order puzzlement how such a terror of virtue could take hold of our political discourse and institutions. It is precisely this question that cultural theorist Catherine Liu addresses with the rise of the new ruling caste of the Professional Managerial Class—also known as the PMC. This caste is characterized by how it claims social privileges for itself in a sharp demarcation against the lower classes – or the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton referred to them. As an excellent stratagem, this hidden class struggle makes excellent use of symbolic currency as the capital Pierre Bourdieu so aptly described in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. However, as ever-larger sections of the population fight for positions, privileges, and scarce resources, the question of how to succeed in the moral economy is brought into relief. An excellent way out of this dilemma is declaring oneself a victim or behaving as particularly virtuous – a role description that Catherine Liu so aptly analyzes in her Virtue Hoarders. What was so refreshing in our conversation with her was that she never risks losing herself in moral indignation – but instead carries out a class analysis in good Marxist fashion. Thus, she reveals the basic features of the moral economy while also showing the blind spots of this ideology of domination.

Catherine Liu teaches film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she has also served as director of the UCI Humanities Center. Her 2021 book Virtue Hoarders was widely acclaimed, and she’s currently working on a book exploring the significance of trauma for the moral economy.

Catherine Liu has published

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One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological changes for over two decades. Before deciding to become an independent observer, he started his career at various venture capital and equity firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz, Entrepreneur First, and Mosaic Ventures. Now, he provides over 175,000 readers with his observations of the technosphere’s pulse as he interprets which of its often disruptive changes actually matter in his weekly newsletter. As a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he studied history, Evans' perspective is imbued with observations that aren’t limited to technological innovations but also include all the fantastical hopes from which they spring – and their more practical meanings in our everyday world – giving his view of reality that human touch which is often far more potent than the code itself. In any case, a conversation with him can take many marvelous, surprising turns: From one moment to the next, you jump from an industrial-ecological look at a Billy Wilder film (The Apartment with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon) to the question of why saying hello in English lifts and American elevators is experienced as inappropriate, whereas in Germany it is good manners – and this in turn is only the prelude to the question of how accounting is changing under the influence of digitalisation, among many others in our conversation with him.

Benedict Evans lives in New York. In addition to his newsletter and regular essays on his blog, he also presents his insights to major corporations such as Alphabet, Amazon, AT&T, Axa, Bertelsmann, Deutsche Telekom, Hitachi, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nasdaq, Swiss Re, Visa, Warner Media, Verizon and Vodafone.

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