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A Tribute to SVA's Art Writing MFA – The Brooklyn Rail – Brooklyn Rail

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David Levi Strauss

For fifteen years, from 2006 to 2021, the MFA program in Art Criticism & Writing (which changed its name to Art Writing in 2015) invited some of the best and most prominent art writers to speak. The series was established by the founding Chair of the program, Thomas McEvilley, who presided over the first five events, and was then continued by the new chair, David Levi Strauss, to its conclusion. The first talks were held in the SVA Amphitheater on 23rd Street and 3rd Avenue, then moved to the SVA Theatre on 23rd Street and 9th Avenue, and finally to our own department library on 21st Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues. At that point, the series was renamed “Quijote Talks,” in honor of the storied El Quijote bar and restaurant in the Chelsea Hotel, where our students and faculty often went with the speakers for dinner and talk after the lectures. The name was also, of course, inspired by the errant knight himself, and the series consisted of pointed talks and discussions about relevant pasts and possible futures. Here’s the link to the archive: Quijote Talks & Lecture Series Archive

Tributes from Faculty Members in the Program

Debra Bricker Balken

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Teaching Critical Strategies in the SVA MFA Art Writing program was always an exhilarating experience. The students were truly remarkable, engaged not only in the craft of writing but in the urgent issues that confront the practice of criticism. I am sure Levi’s exemplary program will continue to live on through their words.

Michael Brenson

The éminence grises for David Levi Strauss’s Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts were John Berger, Susan Sontag and Leo Steinberg. Each of the three is a revered writer who loved knowledge, thought independently, read closely, and surprised, provoked and moved readers. Each brought into being a community of readers that continues to turn to them. If you look hard, read well and commit yourselves to the never-ending struggle to write with passionate intelligence, art writing has no limits, Levi communicated to his students. Art needs you, the culture needs you, we are behind you, go for it, his program said.

Ann Lauterbach

Working with and for David Levi Strauss at SVA was like entering an asylum for provocative thinking around a brilliant constellation: contemporary visual art, critical writing, politics and poetics. These animated our inquiries, free from jargon and from received ideas of significance. Intellectual freedom is always rare; those of us who were part of Levi’s inspired gathering were lucky and happy, knowing we were having a conversation, with each other and with our students, anchored by his respect and trust. Thank you, Levi!

Nancy Princenthal

The SVA Art Writing MFA program, in which I had the good fortune to teach for more than a decade, brought together students from all over to talk and write about an equally unbounded range of cultural events, objects and ideas. Initiated by Tom McEvilley and developed by David Levi-Strauss, two thinkers and educators of rare breadth, it was a laboratory, a forum, and an uncommonly welcoming home.

Dejan Lukic

The world is full of gatekeepers (especially the academic world). One really has to cross the desert to find an oasis where to be fully oneself. The Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts in New York was one such oasis. All the seeds of my work to come here germinated in an amicable way. This space of freedom, both in spirit and in thought, where I taught for six years, was marked by receptive students and a chair (our dear David Levi Strauss) who let the act of teaching mysteriously open. Presently this space is folding but not dying. It continues to live through the work of those that were nourished in it and now pollinate the world with their words.

Jennifer Krasinski

Both as a teacher and as a writer, I have never felt as proud, or as invigorated, as I have during my eight years on faculty in the MFA Art Writing program at SVA. To have spent that time among colleagues and students who share a passion not only for the art of criticism, but also for the power of the written word, was a joy and an honor. I am deeply grateful to David Levi Strauss for giving me a gift beyond measure; namely, the space and support to teach what I love and believe in most. The cultural landscape is much richer for this program, and I look forward to seeing how the alumni continue to cultivate and shape literature, the arts, and the future.

Lynne Tillman

Levi created a program to extol writing as an art. His doctrine, if one existed, said that being excited by and thinking about ideas and theories is great; talking is great. But writing on them requires as much effort as thinking. In the thesis seminar I taught and participated in, an idea was realized on a page only when the thought was as good as its elucidation. Levi advocated for the necessity of a writer’s excitement and understanding to be written for the page, for readers, meaningfully, even beautifully. I share his belief in the essential relationship of writing and thinking, and am happy to have been a teacher in this critical project.

Emmanuel Iduma

In January 2012, nudged by Eric Gottesman, who had been Levi’s student at Bard, I sent in my application to the Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. After I was accepted and couldn’t resume that fall due to financial constraints, Levi sent me a short essay he wrote at the prompting of Irving Sandler. “Dear Irving,” the essay began, “If it’s not good writing, it can’t be good criticism.” Thus began my apprenticeship, nearly a year before I eventually resumed. That sentence—paraphrased from Walter Benjamin—became, and remains, a defining statement of my work. I needed a lodestar, and Levi, together with the eclectic group of writers and critics he assembled during my two years there (Claudia La Rocco, Nancy Princenthal, Dejan Lukic, Charles Stein, Lynne Tillman, Susan Bee, Thomas Beard, Jennifer Krasinski, and Susan Bell), provided an unforgettable and nonpareil constellation. Things came full circle for me when, in fall 2016, I began teaching the foundational Writing I course at the program. I didn’t think I was deserving, but as he had done for me as a student, Levi placed a bet on all that was yet to come. I point to my trajectory to make my gratitude unflinchingly personal, to say this for myself, and I hope for others: Without your pathfinding work, dear Levi, what would we have done?

Jennifer Kabat

What to say about the art writing MFA that is enough? For a writer who has since my teen years loved bending an object into language and those shimmering, psychedelic possibilities of pushing on words and vision and time and histories, there is no place I wanted to teach more. Also, because the program celebrated the essay as form, a form with its own elasticity … And, that it was the only place in the country doing this work with criticism, and that it included a broad array of students across diverse backgrounds. In my short time working with them, they’ve explored everything from works of high modernism to breaking capitalism in the lyric form to shit and Sheila Fell. This program that Levi developed and shepherded held my pedagogical heart and now that heart is broken.

Phong H. Bui

Among the most profound pleasures of my teaching career was passing to my students what I’d learned from Meyer Schapiro’s worldview of humanism and his thoughtful advocacy for the artists’ “inner freedom;” as well as Dore Ashton’s tireless defenses of the artists’ indispensable contributions to our cultural firmaments, and Irving Sandler’s essential on-the-spot art history with artists in their studios, among others. The opportunity to share how we, critics, writers, and curators communicate with our artist colleagues with absolute sensitivity, intelligence, and scholarly rigor, has deepened my commitment to carry out this tradition of passing the baton with the utmost care at the Rail. The two graduate seminars I taught at Levi’s program reaffirmed the possibility of bridging the academy and real life experience. I’m forever grateful to Levi and his program, as well for the alliances I forged among faculty members and students, many of whom are essential to the Rail’s ongoing “living organism.”

Lucy Raven

The opportunity to teach in Levi’s Art Writing program was exceptional in a number of ways. As an artist, being asked to to teach future art writers made clear to me Levi’s profound respect and commitment to theory born out of practice, out of looking and thinking deeply and slowly, and out of a complex set of sources and resources that includes makers and thinkers of all kinds. It’s a way to develop theory as practice, as well. As his student years before, at Bard MFA, I learned from how he modeled this method through conversation, correspondence, and the generous act of looking together at work, and allowing thoughts the space and time to take form alongside it.

Michael Taussig

With students, Annette, and Emily, Levi made a beautiful home for the wandering souls of those who cross the Rubicon back and forth between art and writing, art as writing, and writing as transformation. A thing of joy and endless perusal the library they constructed came alive as quivering force for the many guest lectures that I will miss, as will NY City.

Vincent Katz

I have had the good fortune to teach under the leadership of poets and those attuned to poetry’s strictures and delights. In programs led by Anne Waldman and Robert Storr, I felt an expansive vision at that moment when teaching ramifies to the benefit of both teacher and student. David Levi Strauss’s MFA in Art Writing program at School of Visual Arts was just such an environment. Based in Levi’s experiences at New College in San Francisco, his close proximity to Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, and others, his editorial acumen at ACTS: A Journal of New Writing (1982–1990), his SVA program came with the awareness that there is no correct way to write about art, or the world, that a multiplicity of approaches would best serve the community, provided each approach was founded on some necessary principles, including careful reading, open-minded analysis, wide-ranging reference points, and the ability and desire to engage in debate to defend or, if necessary, modify one’s positions. I recall that Levi was a top-notch baseball player in his youth, and I always see that athlete’s alacrity and attention to detail in his thinking. It was an honor and a pleasure to have taught classes on The Poet as Critic and Investigating Interdisciplinarity under Levi’s guidance and leadership in that intimate array of minds.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

During his time as chair of SVA’s Art Writing MFA Program, David Levi Strauss opened up a vital space for many people to experiment, test out ideas, and push their writing further. He gave teachers like me the chance to introduce new courses on criticism in relation to conflict, race, and revolution; on writing about art in the context of film, poetry, and narrative nonfiction. With a light touch, Levi created a real spirit of camaraderie and non-hierarchical learning. The students in the program—who came to SVA from all over the world and brought with them deep levels of expertise in journalism, art history, philosophy, and their own established forms of art writing and art making—were ready to question everything and very often worked harder than any others I have known. They continue to pose important challenges for criticism today, a legacy of the program that will stick around even when that great library is packed up and taken away.

Charles Stein

My seven years teaching my class in Levi’s program was among the most satisfying teaching experiences I have ever had. Smart and fascinating/fascinated students, an astonishingly various population of young writers. How could it be that people from so many anywheres would be interested in listening to me? Ha! I learned plenty. Hope they did too.

Lauren O’Neill-Butler

It’s very sad the program has come to an end as we desperately need new critical voices elevating public discourse now. It’s ending is also a reminder of how the landscape of higher education is changing … for the worse. I’m grateful to Levi for being so cognizant of both of these issues and to the staff and students. I know our conversations will continue regardless.

Alan Gilbert

What I most appreciated about the MFA in Art Writing program at SVA, where I had the privilege to teach in the fall of 2012, was its refusal to approach art through the lens of the market. Too many pieces of art criticism are press releases by other means, and I never had the sense that the program’s guiding pedagogical principle was to provide the tools for explaining an artist’s intentions. Rather, David Levi Strauss and the faculty he assembled aimed to understand the rhetorical, and at times magical, power images have always had, for better and for worse—and when in the service of power, usually the latter. The MFA in Art Writing program taught how to deconstruct these images while simultaneously reconstructing a writer’s art of vision. Its illustrious roster of alumni have graduated to make important contributions across the United States and around the world as writers, editors, curators, and activists. The program will be deeply missed.

Jessica Holmes, Editor of the Degree Critical journal, and Holding Everything Dear: Selections from Degree Critical and the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Writing Published Archive

When Degree Critical was established, about a year after the founding of the MFA Art Writing Program at the School of Visual Arts, it began, as so many digital publications did in 2007, as a blog. Its early years were characterized by a certain quality common to blogs in the mid-2000s: an element of the piecemeal, the hand-stitched that brought together the earliest pieces of writing.

Degree Critical underwent a number of changes in design and format over the ensuing years. The renegade spirit that distinguished the publication remained at the heart, however. What has always made it stand apart from other popular, online art writing publications is the surprising, “anything-can-happen” nature in its approach to art criticism. Degree Critical has always been open to, and encouraging of, alternate ways of considering critical writing. The mission statement of the Art Writing department has long been plain in its aims, and probably scores of the program’s alumni can recall the missive’s most storied line: This program is not involved in “discourse production” or the prevarications of curatorial rhetoric, but rather in the practice of criticism writ large, aspiring to literature.

The gathering together of these writings, representing some of the best of what Degree Critical has had to offer readers, is presented here as a memorial totem to the life of the Art Writing Program. If you are a first-time reader of Degree Critical, we hope this will offer you a little insight into the effervescent writing that has come out of the Art Writing Program over the years, the rigorous thought and the contemplative temper that made being a part of it such a unique experience.

Tributes from Alumni

Ann C. Collins

When I first met with Levi to talk about the MFA in Art Criticism & Writing program, I confessed that I had never written a piece of criticism, but he was certain I could learn. “In an essay,” he said, “you can travel as far as you want in any direction, and when you get lost, you can always come back to the art.” Implicit in that thought, I only later realized, is the notion that criticism requires the curiosity to venture far and the resolution to allow oneself to get disoriented in the process. A few months later, I found myself neck-deep in seminars, workshops, readings, and conversations, all of which invited my fellow students and me to move beyond ourselves into new ways of observing and thinking as we tried to find our footing in the writing of criticism. Levi’s words stayed with me throughout that time, and I think of them still. In the moments when there is nothing on the page but a trail of thoughts that have led me to the crumbling edge of a cliff I suspect will not hold, I do what Levi said. I return to the art and to the experience that each of us who had the privilege of spending time in that department carries with us, and I remember that getting lost is a necessary part of arriving at where you need to be.

Ben Swift

I always had a suspicion that if one had been able to sit for a long enough time in that little library on the sixth floor, reading book after book, talking and listening with whoever passed through, one might have been able to untangle the threads tying together the whole universe.

Less like a library and more like a huge machine for thinking in unexpected ways, the place seemed governed by the power of sortilege: a book pulled at random or a chance conversation would often draw you around an unexpected corner of thinking, and with your ideas pleasantly crashing down around you, you would be pulled into the fruitful realm of the unexpected.

I will miss such trips, though sometimes across harsh terrain. On them one could not have had better guides or companions.

Blessy Augustine

The Art Criticism and Writing program was like a two-year-long Japanese tea ceremony. Every day we sat in a circle and patiently contemplated the artwork or text before us. We handled each word delicately and thoughtfully, both in our reading and our writing. It was somewhere in the middle of the program that I even realized I wanted to be a writer, that I understood what writing meant. I think it remarkable how from all around the world we came here and found each other—students, teachers, rare books, three kinds of coffee pots—and nurtured each other. Though upset that the department’s physical space no longer exists, I think each of us is aware that its legacy will continue through everyone who passed through its doors.

Charles Schultz

I want to bring in the voices of two critics who were foundational to our beloved program, so that the energy and intelligence of their minds can be part of our tribute.

The first is Susan Sontag, from her book On Photography, published in 1977, though the essays appeared initially in the NY Review of Books and in her acknowledgements, she writes that were it not for the encouragement of her friends, specifically Barbara Epstein, Robert Silvers, and Don Erik Levine, the essays may not have happened at all.

From the first essay, In Plato’s Cave; this is how she ends:

It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

And the other quote comes from John Berger, specifically from his book Another way of Telling. A book about photography that Berger made in collaboration with Jean Mohr, published in 1982. Berger acknowledges that this work would not have been possible without the Transnational Institute, which according to its online profile “is an international research and advocacy institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable planet.” Berger was one of the first fellows of the institute, which also initially supported his move from London to the French mountain village, Quincy.

Berger writes,

And in life, meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts can be fed into a computer and become factors in a calculation. No meaning, however, comes out of computers, for when we give meaning to an event, that meaning is a response, not only to the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can exist without the passing of time. Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration; meaning is born of the two. An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.

I framed the quotations this way to accentuate the value of friendship, of community, and to acknowledge the need for encouragement and support in the creative process. The writing program that fostered a community of creative and critical thinkers has closed, but the relationships that were developed and which form the true network of this community remain vibrantly open.

David Shuford

The clear focus of the Art Writing MFA Program at SVA was to refine the student’s writing craft, giving practical and aesthetic advice alike. But at the same time, there was a parallel emphasis on impacting the budding critic’s reading stance. Through the course of study, we were all faced with reading images as well as texts, where the material at hand—whether visual or linguistic—needed to be taken for what it actually contained, without burdening the object of attention with extraneous baggage pulled from outside. The program stressed this direct engagement with the work, eschewing dogmatic approaches, formulaic structures, and other writerly crutches. As reading and writing are resolutely entwined, the faculty’s syllabi were full of authors—many situated beyond an art-specific sphere—who quickly mutated from unfamiliar new material to cherished voices who could stoke an interior dialogue and impel conversations with others in the seminar room and beyond. Vilém Flusser, Édouard Glissant, Fleur Jaeggy, Fernand Deligny, Jill Johnston, Henry Corbin, and Raúl Ruiz are just some who took turns as catalysts, bringing in new frameworks, crushing older forms, and inspiring total commitment to the possibilities of a writing life concerned with culture. The reciprocal relation of writing and reading, of seeing and thinking, the continuous flow of words into idea and image and back again, this transformative maze was underscored by Levi and the other amazing professors at every turn, and as such I am forever grateful.

Hakim Bishara

I don’t know where I would be today, or what I would be doing, if David Levi Strauss hadn’t happened into my life in the fall of 2015 and radically transformed it. I was an unlikely candidate for his Art Writing program: a broke college dropout in his mid-30s facing a career crisis. I’d already given up on the dream of making a living from writing. Instead, I was getting by gigging whatever creative skills I had for heartless corporations, and hating every minute of it. To Levi this didn’t matter: he convinced me to apply to the program against all these odds. Somehow, he had confidence that it would work; I on the other hand was sure the application effort alone would end in total failure. He even fought the school’s administration to waive some bureaucratic requirements that stood in the way—namely that I didn’t even have proof of completing a BA. Now, thanks to him and to his wonderful then-assistant, artist Annette Wehrhahn, I have a life and a career much closer to what I always dreamt of having. It’s the stuff of fairy tales, but it turned out to be true: A kind person who believes in you more than you do yourself comes and offers you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s then up to you to take it and run with it. For me—and for many others—that person was Levi.

I’ll keep mourning the closure of this unique program, which gave so many of its graduates a voice, a craft, and a place in the world. Looking back on its spirit of creative freedom and its defiance of ossified conventions of writing and criticism—I wonder how it existed within an academic institution in the first place. I’m lucky to have taken part in that dream while it lasted.

Kareem Estafan

David Levi Strauss’s Art Writing MFA program gave me tools I didn’t know I needed to write about art, tools that also enabled me to perceive the world in ways I hadn’t expected. As much as I learned certain “how tos” of art criticism, I was led along more intricate paths that reach at the roots of how we see and sense, how we come to know, and how we make meaning. The titles of certain courses I took—Criticism and Risk, Art and Information, Motion Capture, The Sublime and the Beautiful—are enough to illustrate the range of questions posed by a faculty consisting of critics, artists, poets, and philosophers. But this wouldn’t capture the unique pedagogies of figures like Michael Brenson, Ann Lauterbach, Claudia La Rocco, or Lynne Tillman, who, across their differences, share what I understand to be the quality that Levi valued above all: a dedication to cultural criticism that arises from sustained attention and ethical care more than from any particular discourse or “take.” Those same commitments, it turned out, sharpened our perception of all that was unfolding outside our classes—from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to the Occupy Wall Street encampment downtown, in my years—and not only of those events and objects delimited as “art.”

Katheryn Brock

The community of the Art Writing MFA saved my life as a writer. I entered the program with curiosity and a longing for an intellectual community. What I found became the ground for my political and aesthetic education, my development as a person, and a home for fellow travelers. I was a student in the most recent cohort to graduate, which meant over half of our education took place virtually due to the pandemic. Despite our mutual isolations, we read and discussed critical texts; we laughed and held space for each other’s Zoom exhaustion; we wrote theses that stretched the limits of form; we were mentored by professors who demonstrated care and intentionality in their teaching. My time in the program introduced me to a life built by the quality of my attention. It showed me—through teachers who were devoted to their craft, and through texts that illuminated the path—a way toward living.

Kurt Ralske

Great teachers transmit skills or knowledge; or, they empower the individual to teach themself; or, they create within the classroom a social space that becomes an egalitarian political structure to aspire to in the world; or, they serve as a model of how to fully engage with a question. Levi accomplished all these, and something else as well. More than simply “demonstrating engagement with a question,” Levi effectively infected us, his students, with an incurable disease. “How do images affect humans? What is the source of their power, and how do they obtain it? How should this power be handled?” This line of inquiry became the chronic condition, the lifelong ailment of those who studied with Levi. These questions, as revealed in their full beauty and horror by Levi, can’t ever be passed over, or put aside. The stakes are simply too high. Those of us who left Levi’s classroom with the affliction of images know that the permanency of this condition is proof of its central importance, and that to have contracted this disorder was, in fact, a fortuitous gift. We stare at images, the images stare back. We feel grateful.

Sahar Khraibani and Sumeja Tulic

We were standing on the green, putting,
and our recollections came to resemble history:
serious, but not too serious,
redundant—and so on.

Reading Ashbery always reminds us of Bases—two memorable classes that David Levi Strauss taught us. It is there and then that we came to accept that we are people of plurals—we stand on more than one ground. Yes, now and then, these tectonic plates move and collide, the earth shakes, and things break, but it is only to bring certain elements closer to each other. The Art Writing program was a cartographic guide not to certainty but to safety.

Walking into the beautiful and expansive library of the department gave a feeling that could only be matched by conversations we had with Levi and our mentors from the program, in and outside of the classroom. The practice of criticism, as we have been taught, requires making finer and finer distinctions amongst things, but most importantly it was a way to question fundamental notions about life and art.

Not only was the program grounds for expansion in a literary sense, but it also fostered pivotal friendships such as ours. We are forever grateful to our dear Chair and teacher David Levi Strauss without whom we would never have embarked on this journey—and so on.

Will Fenstermaker

The Art Criticism & Writing program at the School of Visual Arts (which became “Art Writing” after I graduated in 2016) did not teach critical theory, curatorial practices, or really any other methodology for approaching art—other than, of course, the practice of writing. Incidentally, this is why the program was accredited as an MFA. On the first day of class, Levi brought two artworks in from his car—a blue saddle painting by Ron Gorchov and a series of frames Kurt Ralske excerpted from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc—set them on the table and (in my memory, he’s departing the room, but he may have remained silently) instructed us to write. Later, he underlined the parts that “felt alive.” Academic insights and other forms of received wisdom were left unmarked, deemed callow; underscored was the language that bluntly communicated the effect of the object’s presence. It was an exercise in forgetting what we thought we knew and learning to see. When in doubt, whenever you’re stuck, teachers reminded us over the years, go back and look longer, look harder. I came to think of writer’s block as something that lives in the punctum caecum, where the retina meets the optic disk and the eye is blind. Something curious happens in the synapses between the eyes and brain, the brain and fingers … if you’ve spent enough time looking, they fire in inarticulable patterns that nonetheless cohere into language. It took most people two years to pass through the Art Criticism & Writing program, or just long enough to begin developing this obscure mental procedure. The class of 2016 comprised seven students. We deemed bad criticism a form of violence against art, and good criticism a way to augment its visual potency. These are mystical processes, to be sure, but we were encouraged to embrace magic and alchemy.

It was the only school of its kind in the world, and it only lasted 15 years. The day I learned, in 2020, that it would shutter was one of the most difficult days of that dismal year. Whatever comes after, whomever wants to nurture the next generation of art critics, will have to account for its absence.

Zi Lin

To be an independent critic is a hard thing in China, because it takes time to write a quality review on an exhibition with little payment, or, most of the time, no payment at all. So I have to earn money by other means. But I am proud of myself, for no matter how hard my financial situation may be, I have never compromised my independence for money or other reasons, because I know that in some parts of this world, my fellow writers from our program are doing the same; and because I know that, one day, If I were to stand in front of Levi, I wouldn’t feel any ashamed of my deeds.

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Trump’s use of blood as image has deep Christian roots – The Washington Post

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LOS ANGELES — In March 2021, the art collective MSCHF and rapper Lil Nas X dropped a limited-edition set of sneakers called Satan Shoes. The modified Nike Air Max 97s included a bronze pentagram and were produced to coincide with the release of “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” which included a video in which the singer gave the Devil a lap dance before usurping his crown.

End of carousel

The ensuing controversy was probably amplified by a curious addition to the shoes, the soles of which included a single drop of human blood, according to the artists. One of the 666 pairs of diabolical footware is now on view, along with its Satanic-themed presentation box, in a J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition called “Blood: Medieval/Modern,” which documents the symbolic power and meaning of blood from the Middle Ages to the current moment.

The Satan Shoes are not the oddest thing on view in this fascinating show, not even close. But they speak to the persistence of blood as a multipurpose and explosive symbol. The exhibition, which opened in late February, doesn’t take up the proliferating use of blood as political metaphor in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, but it explores the deep historical reservoirs of meaning that make the former president’s invocation of blood so disturbing.

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Inspiration for the exhibition, curator Larisa Grollemond says, came in part from the response to an online article she wrote about menstruation in the Middle Ages. But ideas about blood were fundamental to almost every aspect of medieval life, from the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, in which wine was transformed into the blood of Jesus, to medicine, in which blood (along with black and yellow bile and phlegm) was one of the four fundamental humors of the body. Political power was based on bloodlines, or consanguinity, and the definition of power was essentially the right to spill blood, or enlist others to spill it for you.

Christianity was a particularly blood-obsessed religion, with the Nile transformed to a river of blood in the Old Testament plagues of Egypt, and blood flowing freely from Jesus’ body during the flagellation and crucifixion of the New Testament. By the late Middle Ages, the wounds of Jesus took on an iconic power that floated free of the crucifixion narrative and became detached from his body. And so we see his body soaked in blood in an image from a 16th-century prayer book by the Flemish artist Simon Bening, and an even more disturbing image of the side wound of Jesus, from the late 15th century, in which the wound is presented disembodied, a kite- or vulvic-shaped object presented as if on a platter, with a text that confirms it is life-size: “This is the measure of the wound of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

Throughout the exhibition, blood is a marker of authenticity and something that is both life affirming and disgusting. The corpse of someone who died by violence was thought to bleed in the presence of his or her killer, a kind of supernatural proof of crime. Saint Catherine, who fasted almost unto death, was said to be revived after drinking blood from the side wound of Jesus. “And there she slaked her thirst,” according to an early biography.

Yet women, because they bled during menstruation, were also thought to be fundamentally flawed, with an excess of blood that needed purging. “If they are constantly expelling blood,” Grollemond says, “then there must be something fundamentally wrong with them.” Moral stigma was attached to women’s blood, which was rarely represented. Images of childbirth, especially those associated with the fundamental figures of Christianity, including the Virgin Mary, were generally sanitized.

So, Christianity was a blood-soaked, even blood-obsessed, religion and may have become even more so during the late Middle Ages because of crises across Europe that made death terribly familiar, including plagues, religious and political strife, and even changes to the climate.

The resurgence of blood as political metaphor in the United States draws upon these deep wells of symbolic power, copiously though not consistently. When Trump in interviews and rallies last fall began saying that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, his remarks were compared to the frequent use of blood as a metaphor for race, nationality and disease in Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” But Trump, like Hitler before him, was animating toxic ideas far older than 20th-century fascism.

And this wasn’t his first foray into blood discourse. During his 2015 run for president, he seemed to reference menstruation after being pointedly questioned by Megyn Kelly during the first debate of the Republican primaries: She had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In a 2017 tweet, he suggested that he was disgusted by Mika Brzezinski because “she was bleeding badly from a face-lift.” Women and blood were a recurring theme to his speeches during the 2020 campaign, when he mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren for claiming Native American ancestry — or blood — an idea he returned to obsessively, and usually without segue or logical connection to anything else in his speech.

Trump is a rhetorical opportunist who uses imagery reflexively (patriots are always “red-blooded” and sacrifice “blood, sweat and tears”) and for its pure volatility rather than its cultural nuance or historic pedigree. And blood, as demonstrated by the explosive reaction to Lil Nas X’s Satan Shoes, remains one of the most potent ideas in the Western arsenal of meaning.

In a paper discussed at a symposium held at the Getty in early March, Heather Blurton, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, asked: “How did [blood] come to be … a metaphor for familiar, ethnic and racial affiliation?” And she turned to an idea by French historian Michel Foucault, who argued that the fundamental social organizing idea of the medieval period covered in this exhibition was “a symbolics of blood.”

Whether or not Trump intended to suggest a literal “bloodbath” when he threatened economic chaos if he isn’t reelected, the reference to blood was part of a more thoroughgoing effort to tap into the violent energies of the pre-scientific and pre-modern symbolics of blood that is evident throughout this show. He is disgusted by women’s blood; he has good genes or blood running through his veins; he is defending the “blood” of pure Americans against infection and immigration; and the power he seeks is deeply connected to blood and violence. His inaugural address is remembered for a particularly blood-soaked image, American carnage, which is etymologically derived from butchery, flesh and slaughter. All of this gives some of his Christian supporters permission to reembrace the darkest aspects of the symbolics of blood that saturated their religion for centuries.

These are old ideas. They are deeply and historically Christian ideas. And they are terrifying. To see them coursing again is even more surreal and bizarre than a pair of sneakers with a drop of blood in them.

Blood: Medieval/Modern is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through May 19. www.getty.edu.

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At Tiffany's Flagship, Luxe Art Helps Sell the Jewels – The New York Times

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Now that tickets to the Museum of Modern Art are priced at an astonishing $30 apiece, you could be forgiven for timing your visits carefully, making sure that they count.

So, let’s say you find yourself in Midtown Manhattan with an hour or two to spare, and you are yearning for some culture. Perhaps you have already seen MoMA’s latest exhibitions, or perhaps you are not quite in the mood to fork over that kind of money. May I instead suggest stopping by Tiffany & Co.’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue?

No, there are no “Demoiselles d’Avignon” there, and no “Starry Night,” but what The Landmark (as it is called) does offer is a heady fusion of contemporary art and luxury retailing that is as relevant, and discomfiting, as anything you could hope to find in a museum.

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After a renovation by the leather-clad architect Peter Marino that debuted last April, 58 pieces that he selected by major artists — many of them blue, or silver, or both — now fill the 84-year-old building. A color-shifting James Turrell oval is embedded in a wall near one set of elevator doors. Hanging by another is a shiny Damien Hirst cabinet filled with rows of cubic zirconia. Hovering next to the engagement rings is one of Anish Kapoor’s eye-bending mirrored discs. On the ground floor, 14 arched window frames glow with a state of the art animation by Oyoram Visual Composer, of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park — the city is immaculate, with no people, just birds.

And that giant-size, faux-deteriorated Venus of Arles with a Tiffany Blue patina? That comes from the mind of Daniel Arsham, who has devoted his career to such banal corporate collaborations. He has designed a limited-edition bracelet and sculpture for the brand, as well as, I quote, “exclusive Pokémon-inspired jewelry.”

The key work here is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “Equals Pi,” from 1982, his milestone year. (MoMA, for the record, does not own a Basquiat painting.) It is high up on a wall on the ground floor, covered by a translucent shield, looking a little forlorn. It has Basquiat’s classic crowns and handwritten text, and its turquoise ground is awfully close to Tiffany’s trademarked color. When the Tiffany executive Alexandre Arnault used it in an ad campaign with Beyoncé and Jay-Z back in 2021, he proposed that the artist may have been making a “homage” to the brand. Some who actually knew Basquiat were quick to reject that.

But let’s not dwell on conflict. Just about everything in this 10-story palace is bright, polished, antiseptic and exactly where it should be. There are stunning flower arrangements, stacks of art books, and capacious public restrooms. The salespeople are unfailingly polite. “I’m just poking around,” I told one who asked to help. “Poke away,” he replied. The atmosphere is subtly disorienting, a bit unnerving, as in a casino or an elite art fair during its early hours. There is money at stake here.

Buyers sip sparkling wine or ice water as they try on jewelry. Two are being led to a private room, where pastel-colored macarons might await. Behind one discreet blue velvet rope is a hallway with paintings by Hans Hartung and Jules de Balincourt (blue and blue).

It is tempting to wring one’s hands about this instrumentalization of high art to sell high-end accessories, but many decades have passed since Mark Rothko canceled his commission for the lavish Four Seasons Restaurant, reportedly saying that “anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” Ideas about art’s purity, and the stigma of selling out, have less currency today.

In any case, Marino’s Tiffany project follows in a rich tradition. In the 1950s, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg collaborated on window displays for Bergdorf Goodman, across the intersection from Tiffany’s, and Bonwit Teller, a block south. They used a pseudonym, but Rauschenberg later had work on view at Bonwit Teller. (The pair also worked with Gene Moore at Tiffany; the designer’s displays are featured in exhibits at the Landmark.)

Andy Warhol showed in the Bonwit Teller windows, too, in 1963, just as he was becoming a star. The venturesome Robert Irwin produced a spectral sculpture for a California mall in 1970, and Takashi Murakami infamously incorporated a Louis Vuitton pop-up in his 2007—08 traveling museum retrospective. (Vuitton’s parent company, LVMH, which is controlled by France’s art-loving Arnault family, acquired Tiffany in 2021.)

The works at Tiffany are, alas, not for sale — they have been purchased, commissioned, or borrowed by the company — but there is a robust history of department stores hawking art. In the 1960s, the actor and art historian Vincent Price was involved with art sales at Sears, and in Minneapolis at that time, the Dayton’s department store (which created Target) had a gallery with material by leading artists, some via the famed New York dealer Leo Castelli.

In China, the developer Adrian Cheng has filled his K11 malls with trendy art, and in Seoul, where I lived until recently, a Frank Gehry-designed Vuitton store has hosted compact shows of Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz and Warhol from the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s holdings. (Marino handled the interiors.) Last year, the Shinsegae department store’s gallery, at a high-end clothing offshoot called Boon the Shop, had a Rirkrit Tiravanija show that included free T-shirts by the artist, just as his recent MoMA PS1 survey did.

In 1970, the Print Collector’s Newsletter quipped that “being a ‘department store gallery’ is a dubious distinction; it is not quite an insult, but surely not a compliment,” calling it a domain of “middlebrow art.” As it happens, much of the art at Tiffany is middling — the sort of adequate, professional things one could find in auction house day sales or uninspired booths at art fairs anywhere in the world. A brand this rich could have been far more ambitious and daring.

Anyway, for the next two months, you can take a closer look at Marino’s taste by booking a free ticket to “Culture of Creativity: An Exhibition from the Peter Marino Art Foundation,” which is on view in the Tiffany Gallery — an airy space high in the building that was designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, with excellent views of Billionaires’ Row. You will find almost 70 more pieces, including intricate, witty 19th-century Tiffany silver, bronze sheep (by François-Xavier Lalanne) atop artificial grass, serviceable pieces by artists represented elsewhere in the store (Francesco Clemente, Vik Muniz, Sarah Sze), and many portraits of Marino: emblazoned on a Michelangelo Pistoletto mirror, in Roe Ethridge photos, and painted atop broken dishes in a Julian Schnabel.

There is one very dark moment that surprised me in the Marino show: a large 1980 Sarah Charlesworth photo, an appropriated image of a man falling from a building. It curiously echoes two grand wall pieces that Rashid Johnson created for the store, as part of his “Falling Man” series. Johnson’s depictions of pixelated, upside-down (Tiffany Blue) men recall 8-bit videogame characters. They are surrounded by mirrored panels that have been scratched and partially cracked, as if smashed by a hammer.

These works are meant to be “existential investigations, meaning the idea of man falling through space, finding himself,” Johnson told an interviewer last year. Fair enough. But you could also see them as portraits of a culture intent on self-destruction (or outlines of bodies at a crime scene); spend time with them, and you may find that their hints of violence stick with you.

You will want to relax after this dizzying experience. The $30 you have saved will not go too far at the Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud, on the sixth floor, where the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” menu is $59 per person (before tax and tip), but you can at least enjoy a glass of Champagne as you reflect. Why not order a second, or a third? This moment will not last forever.

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Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’ – The Guardian

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Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave, came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

Cave studied art in Melbourne in the mid-70s before being chucked off his degree course. He reckons he was too fascinated by the subject for his own good. He spent all his time talking about art to the older students and didn’t find the hours to do the actual work. Now, he is making up for lost time.

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We are at the headquarters of Susie’s business, where she makes and stores the beautiful dresses she designs as The Vampire’s Wife. For now, it’s doubling as Cave’s studio. He gives me a tour of the 17 ceramic figurines, which will be exhibited at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels next month. The pieces are stunning in a creepy, Cave-esque way, all blood-curdling pastoral idylls. But it’s as a series that they are most powerful. The sculptures, inspired by Staffordshire “flatback” ceramics from the Victorian era, forge a shocking and deeply personal narrative.

Initially, we see the devil as a child – a cute little lad, dimple-cheeked in a white jumpsuit sitting next to a red monkey. “Look at his little face,” Cave says, lovingly. We see the devil getting up to erotic mischief with a sailor, then ecstatic with his first love. “I’m extremely happy with this one,” Cave says. “His impish pleasure and her just drained of life.”

We see the devil going to war in a field of flowers, wading through a field of blood and skulls on his return, getting married. Then the series takes a traumatic turn. “This is The Devil Kills His First Child,” Cave says. “It’s a little Isaac and Abraham thing. Then he’s separated from the world. Life goes on. Then he dances for the last time.” And now we are at the final piece. “He bleeds to death. He’s found washed up and the child is forgiving him, leaning out to him with his hand.”

It’s impossible to know how to respond when Cave reaches the story’s conclusion other than to gulp or weep. After all, this is a man who has lost two sons over the past nine years. In 2015, 15-year-old Arthur died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022, 31-year-old Jethro, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne. Death and grief have informed all of Cave’s work since Arthur died. But this takes it to another level.

We say goodbye to the Cave twins, who continue painting pubic hair in gold lustre on the devil’s first love. “We’ll see you, guys! Slave away, my children!” Cave says.

Liv smiles.

“I’m already dressed like a Victorian child’,” Dom says.

“A pint of stout for lunch!” Cave says.

We move into Susie’s office to chat. It’s dark, gothic, a dream home for bats. He whips off his lab coat to reveal an immaculate three-piece suit and sits behind the desk. Before I sit down, I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.

“Aaah, man! Here, let me stand up.” The last time we talked was 16 years ago. He was making a video that featured Arthur and his twin brother, Earl, who were then seven, gorgeous and already musical (Arthur was playing drums, Earl guitar).

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

Every Cave story seems to begin with a death. Take the origin of the figurines. He went into the studio to start work on them the day his mother, Dawn, died. He had planned to start on that date – 15 September 2020 – for a while. “Susie made me go. She said: ‘Get there and do your work.’” He adored Dawn – she had always stood by him, no matter what trouble he was in. (The day his father died in a car crash, she was called to the police station to bail out 19-year-old Cave after he had been charged with burglary.)

Did he have any idea what he wanted to create in the studio? No, he says, but there was an inevitability about the subject. “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son. And even when I was glazing these, Jethro died, so it’s like …” He comes to a stop. “What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”

Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

He returns to the final figurine. “You have this hollowed-out old man with a little child, possibly a dead old man, dead in a pool of tears – a biblical flood of tears, shall we say – and the little child is reaching down in forgiveness. It’s called The Devil Forgiven.” He smiles. “I hope this isn’t too abstract, too woo-woo. Art has a way of bringing to you the things you need to know. It feels to me that art knows what’s going on more than the artist knows what’s going on.”

Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

Cave believes he is emerging from his losses a different man. He has a point. It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.

Soon after Arthur’s death, the family moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years: “We were triggered too much by things. We were just down the road from where it happened.” Everybody seemed to know what had happened to Arthur, because it was so widely reported, but he says that ended up being a positive. “I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

He was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. “I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing. And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me. I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”

Did his experience of bereavement help after Jethro died? “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.” Did he feel cursed? “No. No, I don’t feel cursed, no.” He says it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro – he didn’t meet Jethro till he was seven and their relationship was complex; although they became close, it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up. (Cave’s first two children, Luke and Jethro, were born 10 days apart to different women.)

Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

Cave feels he is misunderstood in another way, after saying recently that he has always been “temperamentally” conservative and attacking the “self-righteous belief” and “lack of humility” of woke culture. This has led some to assume he is supping with the “alt-right”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.”

The forthcoming Bad Seeds album is the first thing he has created since Arthur’s death that isn’t “set through a lens of loss”. He is funny when talking about his work – so angsty and uncertain early in the process, almost messianic by the end. “The new album is really good. It’s really strong. Great songs,” he says.

Similarly with The Devil – A Life. He has got over the doubts and now he is buzzing with self-belief. Is he nervous about the exhibition? “No, I’m excited. I think the ceramics are really good and really strange.” But he feels unusually protective towards his figurines and the story that they tell. “These guys feel extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable little things, and they are saying something deeply personal.”

Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life is at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May

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