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Where the Wild Boar Dies: Power, Pageantry, and Performance in Carle Vernet’s A Boar Hunt in Poland

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Carle Vernet,  A Boar Hunt in Poland , ca. early 19th century. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Photograph by the author. The moment you look at it, you can feel the dirt fly. Not metaphorically. Literally,  A Boar Hunt in Poland  by Carle Vernet seems to detonate right in front of you. Horses rear, dogs snarl, a pike catches the light mid-thrust. In the middle of it all, a dying boar still fights back, a lump of muscle and defiance against the crimson swirl of aristocracy on horseback. It’s not a painting so much as a tableau frozen milliseconds before either triumph or gore. But beyond its bravado, the painting whispers something older and colder: this isn’t just a hunt, it’s a ritual. A performance of dominance. A mirror of empire. And the more you look, the more it begins to resemble a history painting in disguise, a drama of class, conquest, and the spectacle of control. Carle Vernet’s  A Boar Hunt in Poland  is an early 19th-century oil painting, pa...
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Beyond the Blurb: What This Blog Is, and What It Refuses to Be

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  The Cultural Sea of Noise We live in a golden age of access, and a landfill of meaning. There’s more art, more music, more books, more films, more curated travel itineraries, and more content about all of it than ever before. You can stream ten thousand movies before breakfast. You can scroll through a hundred half-thoughts on architecture, or watch someone “explain” Hamlet in thirty seconds with a ring light and a soft filter. And yet, with all of that, so little of it seems to  stay . We binge and forget. We repost without reading. We skim for vibes, not ideas. Culture is everywhere, but depth? That’s getting harder to find. That’s the climate this blog enters into. Not to “disrupt the discourse” (a phrase I would only use ironically and under duress), but to step aside from the churn and say:  What if we actually slowed down and looked? What if we treated a film not as content but as a question? What if we read a book not to post a rating, but to ask:  Why was t...
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Misdiagnosed: Reclaiming “Barefoot” from Critical Neglect

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Photo by Bart Singer - © 2013 - Barefoot Pictures, LLC I know this is a strange choice to launch a blog about art and culture, a forgotten romantic dramedy from 2014 that critics barely touched and the mental health community seemed to swat away on reflex, like a gnat that got too close to a diagnosis.  Barefoot  is not a canonical work. It’s not visionary or cult-classic. It's a quiet movie by traditional standards. But it’s where I’m starting.  Barefoot , odd, unassuming, and almost accidentally revealing, is part of what drove me to create this space in the first place. This blog wasn’t born out of a need to celebrate prestige. It was born out of frustration at how often cultural works, especially small, fragile, tonally strange ones, get misread, flattened, or dismissed by people who seem not to have experienced them at all. The kind of “critical drive-by” that reduces a film to a logline, a thumbnail, or worse, a hashtag for outrage. I wrote about this in m...
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