Articles by Sven Lütticken
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Cultural Revolution
NLR 87, May-June 2014, pp. 115-131in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Mutations of an untimely concept, in a period when capitalism has arrogated to itself the power of radical transformation. From Debord and Marcuse to the contemporary art world, by way of punk rock and hip hop.
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Performance Art After TV
NLR 80, March-April 2013, pp. 109-130in
Subjects: Art , Media
Relations between TV and performance art since the 1960s as a tangled skein of complicity and contestation. Sven Lütticken traces shifts in modes of acting, working and self-presentation, within a televisual world itself now being absorbed by cybernetic and digital systems.
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Dialectic of Dionysus
NLR 76, July-August 2012, pp. 119-127in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Biography and Intellectual History
Sven Lütticken on Asger Jorn, Fraternité Avant Tout. The Danish artist and Situationist wrestles with Engels and Nietzsche.
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Playtimes
NLR 66, November-December 2010, pp. 125-140in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Philosophy
Once deemed extinct, the play instinct now pervades the worlds of work and leisure. Can it be turned to radical ends? Sven Lütticken seeks clues in Schiller and Debord, Neuschwanstein and computer games.
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Attending to Abstract Things
NLR 54, November-December 2008, pp. 101-122in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Philosophy
From the philosophe De Brosses in the eighteenth century to the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman and the conceptualist Sol LeWitt in the twentieth—via Hegel, Creuzer and Marx—the fates of the fetish and the commodity, in critical thought and art.
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Unnatural History
NLR 45, May-June 2007, pp. 115-131in
Subjects: Literature , Philosophy
Do increasingly dark ecological portents indicate a deeper transformation of nature itself? Sven Lütticken elaborates a historicized conception of nature, seeking precedents and contrasts in 19th- and 20th-century philosophies and fictions. Dinosaurs and overmen, Geist and entropic decline in Verne, Nietzsche, Schelling and Smithson.
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Idolatry and its Discontents
NLR 44, March-April 2007, pp. 107-119in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art , Netherlands
Amid rhetorical dust-storms over purported Islamist threats to Western values, Sven Lütticken finds antecedents for contemporary struggles over the image in Judaic and Protestant bans on idolatry. Multiple meanings of the veil and varying forms of iconoclasm, under the aegis of the spectacle.
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Suspense and . . . Surprise
NLR 40, July-August 2006, pp. 95-109in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Cinema , Media
Media projections of the ‘war on terror’ as manipulations of shock and time, purveyed through a perpetual present of 24-hour coverage and on-line news. Lessons from Hitchcock, Conrad and Benjamin on the poetics of suspense and possibilities for a rehistoricization of the attentat.
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The Feathers of the Eagle
NLR 36, November-December 2005, pp. 109-125in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Lifting, swiping, zapping: popular expressions that have been aesthetic tactics since Dada. Sven Lütticken recasts the history of such practices of appropriation—not excluding those of Warhol or Debord, sometimes misplaced—as so many exercises in mythology. Anticipated by Flaubert, theorized by Barthes, staged by Broodthaers, is time running out for such creative misuses of past or present, as ‘intellectual property rights’ tighten?
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After the Gods
NLR 30, November-December 2004, pp. 83-103in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Mythology as the ‘condition and subject of all art’ in the varying conceptions of the early German Romantics and neoclassicism: from Schelling and Schlegel to Winckelmann and Goethe, meditations on Laocoon and anticipations of the Gesamtkunstwerk—issuing into the uncanny mythopoeias of modernity in Melville’s Confidence Man and the White Whale.
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Planet of the Remakes
NLR 25, January-February 2004, pp. 103-119in
Subjects: Art , Cinema
From Hollywood retreads to avatars of Dr Mabuse and re-creations of Solaris, the mimetic planet. Dialectic of repetition and historicity in the remake, reviled mainstay of the culture industry—and manifesto for a radical reappropriation of the form.
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Stripes, No Stars
NLR 20, March-April 2003, pp. 160-166in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Sven Lütticken on Daniel Buren, Mot à Mot. Could a collaboration between avant-garde artist and sociologist escape the logic of the spectacle, or must it in some fashion reproduce it? Bourdieu’s last notes on art, with a view of Paris rooftops.
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Secrecy and Publicity
NLR 17, September-October 2002, pp. 129-148in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Can the legacies of the classical avant-gardes be renewed as effective strategies in postmodern conditions, or are they condemned to mere pastiche? After Bataille, Warhol and Smithson, the possibilities of counter-media, and uncertainties of counter-publics.
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The Art of Theft
NLR 13, January-February 2002, pp. 89-104in
Subjects: Art
From Dürer to Barbie Doll, icons and images have been illicitly copied, quoted, parodied and purloined. As corporations wage war on such misappropriations in the name of copyright today, how far do the arts of détournement and culture jamming offer radical applications of a classical tradition?
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Parklife
NLR 10, July-August 2001, pp. 111-118in
Subjects: Aesthetics
From the zoological garden, via the nature reserve and the theme-town, to the TV reality-show—sequences from the evolution of ‘parklife’. Disney and Waco, Sloterdijk and Deleuze, Spielberg and Smithson, as prisms for the fate of postmodern space.
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From Media to Mythology
NLR 6, November-December 2000, pp. 134-143in
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art , World Economy and Globalization
From Lessing to Greenberg, criticism of the arts was founded on the distinctions made between them. Does technology today irreversibly ruin these? Sven Lütticken asks what a radical practice that accepted convergence between artistic media would look like.
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Also available in Spanish