Essays by

Jacob Mikanowski

Climbing Kanchenjunga

Kanchenjunga is the third-tallest mountain in the world.

An Ill Wind

Social science assumes that a pattern governs human affairs. I think all we have is a wheel of fire. I’ve started to think that all history gives us is stories, stories that accumulate meaning like springs and burst through at the appointed time.

Camera-phone Lucida

Art changes all the time, and when it changes, so does its history. … The word “selfie” only dates back to 2002, when it was coined on an Australian internet forum (and what an antique wind already blows from that word ‘forum’) by a clumsy drunk who took a photo of himself after tripping over a staircase at a friend’s twenty-first birthday party, and it hasn’t been in widespread use for more than a few years. By 2013 it was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word-of-the-year. By now, in 2016, the selfie is as common as water, responsible for a clutch of hideous gadgets as well as several dozen fatalities: a plane crash, a boat capsizing and at least one (alleged) dolphin murder.

Stalin’s Finger

In 1949, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia decided to honor Stalin by building a monument to him in […]

The Art of Decay

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale. […]

Noma

So this is Redzepi’s wish: to put a piece of ground in front of a diner and have him figure it out. And once you got over your dismay at being served moss on a plate, maybe you would.

Haters

Karl Kraus was a terror. Scourge of the misplaced comma, bane of the sentimental or stupid remark, champion of linguistic purity and artistic rigor, destroyer […]

Mad Men

Beneath its layers of vintage décor and television cliché, Mad Men is a story about history, and possibly the closest thing we have in the culture to a historical epic.

Spot Art

No one commands higher prices than Damien Hirst, and nothing is more fashionable than to loathe him. Still, we can’t do without him. In his […]

Cloud Gate, Tilted Arc

One of the things Cloud Gate’s brilliant surface makes it easy to forget is that it isn’t just a mirror or a void or a gate. It’s also a triumphal arch, and like the rest of Millennium Park, the triumph it celebrates is the triumph of Daleyism—that particular blend of hereditary democracy, crony capitalism and corporate welfare that is Chicago’s gift to the world.

View From Above

Struth’s work differs in the attention he pays to human figures and the degree to which he allows contingency to dictate his results. His motto might be: coldness without cruelty.

After Arcadia

Cy Twombly once said that if he could have been any other artist, he would have been Poussin.