Caesura

Caesura is an online magazine of art and criticism.

Caesura is a modest project to collect the scattered fragments of art and criticism working to escape the aimlessness that plagues the present. We are looking to publish visual art, poetry, prose, and music as well as fundamental criticism and commentary from artists and writers that recognize the task before us and the need for something new. We have no schemas or positive ideals to enshrine, nor do we endorse particular styles, techniques, or media. What we have to offer is a sense of history, of the dead-end of the present and the disappointment of the past: “a total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.” What we ask is simply that art prove its right to exist.

08/09/2026

“Politics is the surest way of avoiding freedom.”

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New: Sam Jennings on art, freedom, and the need for a counter-culture.

07/15/2026

“American culture is world culture not because America succeeded but because it posed the world’s task first: what becomes of art when culture no longer carries it?”

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Now online: Caesura’s editors in conversation on what America means for art and artists today.

“So will American art be unconsciously American, or consciously American? Those seem to be the only options.“

07/01/2026

“Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”

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In his latest for Caesura, Omair Hussain considers American Painting — not as “a conservative defense of America [or] set of concrete cultural traditions that must be preserved,” but as “an attempt to move beyond the weight of the entire past of art.“

Read now at caesuramag.org.

04/15/2026

“Woe to ye anthropologists who make camp here! Some knowledge truly is lost for all time.”

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If art and politics share a historical basis in bourgeois society, then it is no wonder that “after the potential to remake the world disappeared, modern art’s antisocial sociability transformed into mere specialization,” Clay Mills writes.

In “Obsolescent Experience,” he considers art as “a cryptogram for society’s own unrealized freedom.”

Read in full at caesuramag.org.

04/11/2026

“The whole Biennial, in fact, feels like the work of a future civilization that has discovered the wreckage of 21st Century ‘contemporary art,’ and did their best, based on extensive archeological and archival research, to stage a faithful reproduction. Like Colonial Williamsburg.”

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At the 2026 Whitney Biennial, one “really has to fu***ng *imagine* being transformed by anything,” writes Allison Hewitt Ward. Read in full at caesuramag.org.

03/31/2026

“Painting persists because a total social transformation that might overcome the need for painting didn’t happen.”

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New at caesuramag.org: painter Omair Hussain () revisits Douglas Crimp’s “The End of Painting” in a moment “marked by the return of painting (and after ’s acquisition of Norman Rockwell’s “The Dugout.”)

03/19/2026

“In every individual,” Freud wrote, “two trends, one towards personal happiness, and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.”

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“On the face of it, Pluribus seems only the latest part of a wave of science fiction narratives designed to be ‘about’ some ‘thing’ or other.” But AI is only one part of the show’s greater concern with “relatability and modern society,” Michael McClelland argues.

Read his full review at caesuramag.org.

03/05/2026

“Among the splatters and calcified pours, no brushstroke the scale of a human, nor their signature, is present. According to the paintings themselves, the material history they leave us to read, the human who made them is but energy, moved by and mover of matter that is always already there.”

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“If we slough off the gunk built up over the past decades from self-aggrandizing misuse in artist statements and press releases,” Anna Gregor writes, “then ‘subvert’ is not so bad a term to begin to articulate” what Dora Nelson’s (“literally sub-vers-ive”) paintings do.

Read ’s full review of “The Individualism of Dona Nelson” (.nyc) at caesuramag.org.

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