Arcade

the-drained-pool

Linda Besner looks beneath our culture's obsessions and preoccupations, and explores what's revealed when there's no surface left to hide it.
8 posts

Til Freedom Do Us Part

When it comes to 20th century intellectual power-couples, no two represented more disparate ideas about marriage and freedom than the chain-smoking liberationists Sartre and de Beauvoir on the one hand, and the neoliberal economists Milton and Rose Friedman on the other.
by Linda Besner /

A Portrait in Search of a Self

Does a dream house imply a dream self? Linda Besner, hunting for a home, considers how the photography used in listings serves as a malleable, market-driven form of portraiture.
by Linda Besner /

Order and the Stable Self

What’s the meaning of a sentence? A paragraph? Linda Besner considers the abecedarian work that makes Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries so much more than an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation.
by Linda Besner /

The Naked Pool

At the intersection of the public and private, the clothed and unclothed, the swimming pool has long been a favoured motif among artists and writers. But as fall settles in, what about the months when it's closed? Who are the artists of the drained pool?
by Linda Besner /