A 2011 study at University College London found that when we behold a pleasing work of art, blood rushes to our head in a physiological reflex that’s akin to gazing at a loved one. What explains such an immediate and unconscious seduction? In his new book Affinities: On Art and Fascination, critic and essayist Brian Dillon takes this instinctive rapport as the starting point for a series of elegant and discursive meditations on art’s enchantments. The book is the third in a trilogy devoted to close reading; its predecessors, Essayism (2017) and Suppose a Sentence (2020), were paeans to essays and sentences respectively. In Affinities, Dillon turns his attention to images, and is again a rangy scavenger. His source material—photographs, film stills, and engravings, among other artifacts—chronologically spans the 17th century to the pandemic lockdown of 2020. Each chapter riffs on an image, tracing the contours of an artist’s biography or following Dillon’s own intuitive associations. Heavyweights such as Warhol, Arbus, and Eggleston mingle with more esoteric subjects like migraine auras, the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, and the 19th century astronomical observations of the English polymath John Herschel. Interlaced with these short exegeses is a ten-part “essay on affinity” that unpacks the historical, etymological, conceptual, and personal baggage of the term. The result is a provocative and open-ended investigation of art’s ineffable allure.   

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Dillon begins with semantic negotiations. “How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities,” he writes. He describes affinity as “something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions.” Dillon’s brand of affinity goes deeper than the internet’s algorithmic recommendations, and is more authentic than the manufactured kinships trumpeted in marketing collateral. Affinity, he writes, is like fascination, but not. It’s a less sentimental sibling to appreciation: a term with the same bloodline but a different character. It’s beyond aesthetics. It’s impermanent. Ultimately, it’s not even thinkable—a “mode of dumb fascination.” Elsewhere in the book, he describes the attempt to anatomize affinity as “stupid” and “idiotic.” His thematic playground here is the gap between how art transfixes us and our inability to articulate that transfixion. (T.J. Clark’s 2006 book on Poussin, The Sight of Death, shares such language; he wonders if only “the physical, literal, dumb” act of looking can satisfy the mind.)   

It’s risky to structure a book as a kind of Wunderkammer—what if it dissipates into its own eclecticism?—and riskier still to feature artists who have been embalmed by decades of analysis. But Dillon’s accretive method is itself a textual demonstration of affinity that helps his various subjects cohere. Artists who have their own chapter reappear in chapters about others: William Klein is invoked alongside Arbus and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada; Claude Cahun is mentioned in connection to Dora Maar and Francesca Woodman. Chapters succeed each other in subtle embellishment, echoing or annotating earlier themes. In the first essay, for example, Dillon considers Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the first book in English to present observations made with a microscope. “Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea,” Dillon writes. This is followed by a chapter on Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (ca. 1838), a photograph of a Paris street that’s believed to be the first to depict living people: the smudged apparitions of a man and his boot polisher. Nothing links these two works except an analogy that Dillon leaves implicit: Just as a microscope reveals the invisible world around us, so can a photograph illuminate what we typically ignore.  

This understated approach is typical of Dillon. He writes atmospherically and impressionistically rather than critically. Here is how he describes a photo of dancer Loie Fuller: “She looks like a primitive aircraft coming apart, a soft disintegrated Blériot.” About the elderly subject of a 1970s Eggleston photo, whose particolored dress clashes with the floral cushion she sits on, he writes: “She holds onto her cigarette as if she might disappear amid all this patterned excess.” In Arbus’s ensemble of outcasts and misfits he discerns an “aristocratic distance”—an apt phrase whose accuracy doesn’t evoke any one image but the whole dispassionate vantage of Arbus’s work. 

As befits a book conceived during the pandemic, Affinities is introspective and fitfully elegiac, even as it seeks communion. In his chapter on Vue du boulevard du Temple, Dillion recalls walking around London during the spring of 2020. He notes “a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before”—fellow housebound Londoners out for a stroll who, like Daguerre’s phantasmal figures from nearly two centuries earlier, are rendered newly vivid by their circumstances. A chapter about the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a monument in London whose plaques record stories of ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, begins as another pandemic scene before taking a more philosophical turn. “The things a nation may conceal from itself inside an idea of heroism,” Dillon muses, noting that many would-be plaques on the monument remain blank. Elisions, often conceptual, recur throughout the book, most pointedly in the final chapter, which lists “images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.” (Among the missing: French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s depiction of his cat catching a ball; filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid of his wife and their dog standing by a fence in Russia.) 

Project For Empty Space (PES), the New Jersey-based arts organization that supports socially-aware artists, has tripled their operating budget thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Grant in Arts and Culture. 

With this windfall, which will flow into the PES coffers through 2024, the organization will be able to expand its hub in Newark, double the number of artists who can participate in its residency program, and hire much needed staff.

“There are so many ways that this funding allows us to realize many of our long-standing goals,” the PES co-directors Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol told ARTnews via email.

PES is rooted in art tied to social discourse and activism and the directors say that besides the obvious benefits of expansion, the Mellon Grant money will help them encourage artists in PES programs “to really flex their imaginations during their times with us.”

Like many small non-profits, PES runs with a relatively small crew. The Grant money will also allow Wahi and Jampol to bolster their staff starting with the addition of a Residency Manager and a Director of Development, who will help with PES’s expansion plans and influx of artists.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has pushed the boundaries of Native American art since the 1970s with her expansive practice, activism, and advocacy. Her just-opened show “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” at the Whitney Museum of American Art is the first retrospective for an Indigenous artist that the institution has ever organized. It brings together five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures—including her iconic painting from 2000, Memory Map. Quick-to-See Smith has also been busy working as a curator of “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” a survey of contemporary Native American art slated to open September 24 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Quick-to-See Smith spoke with Art in America about how she began making memory maps, the importance of Native languages, and bringing different communities together.

How did you start making memory maps?

I started making these kind of abstract landscape maps from fields of fireweed and mustard—things that I would see on my reservation—when I was in graduate school. In the early work from the 1970s, you can see these abstract maps with bars of color intermixed with pictographs. For roughly the last 50 years, I’ve been collecting books on pictographs, petroglyphs, and glyphs, and I visit sites. I’ve always had a long-running interest in how we Native people each see the land because we come from various terrains and geographical areas, all with different foods, housing, traditions, and origin stories. There are 561 federally recognized tribes and hundreds more that are not recognized.

One thing I discovered was that most of us didn’t make a horizon line. I really didn’t know why, but, in talking to people and thinking about myself and how I work, I believe it’s related to our stories, which portray a holistic world: the sky above and the land below, groundwater recharge. Everything is connected. Our stories are often interwoven with things that come down from the sky, particularly in relation to water. Near my house, there’s a site that’s at least 1,000 years old or older and, if I go down in the kiva, all the images inscribed onto the wall—the catfish, the river, a woman giving birth, the eagle with water spray coming out of its mouth sharing with the cactus—center around water. Water is life. Now we’re in a drought, so that makes it even more important.

Karin Hindsbo, the director of Oslo’s National Museum, will be the next director of Tate Modern, making her the second woman in a row—and the second one ever—to lead the London institution.

Hindsbo succeeds Frances Morris, who became the first woman to lead Tate Modern in 2016. Morris’s term at Tate Modern ends this month.

Under Hindsbo, the National Museum launched an epic project to bring together several disparate institutions run by the Norwegian state under its aegis. Along with that came an effort to significantly expand the museum, making it the largest art institution in the Nordic region.

Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate museum network, said in a statement, “The success of the new National Museum in Oslo—delivered in the midst of a global pandemic—is a testament to her skill as a leader. Her nuanced and diverse approach to expressing national and transnational artistic ecologies chimes with Tate Modern’s ethos brilliantly.”

That new building, which opened last June, added more than 580,000 square feet and cost more than $700 million. Upon its opening, the building was well-received in the international press, but the run-up to its inauguration was contentious in Norway, where issues with contractors working on the expansion were widely reported in the press.

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The Headlines

GROW OR GO. The Dallas Museum of Art has selected six finalists for an expansion project that comes with a budget of $150 million to $175 million, the Dallas Morning News reports. The lucky firms are David Chipperfield, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Johnston Marklee, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Weiss/Manfredi, and Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos. The paper’s architecture critic, Mark Lamster, writes that the selection committee “has leaned in to the tried and true—with one notable exception.” That would be the Madrid-based Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, which has worked largely in Europe, but has still handled a number of cultural projects, like the National Sculpture Museum in Valladolid, Spain. The winner will be named in August.

A DOUBLEHEADER. In Hong Kong, the artist JR has made a sprawling installation to mark the end of the city’s mask mandate, pasting black-and-white photos of some 450 volunteers to the floor and a wall at the Harbour City shopping center, the South China Morning Post reports. Not everyone is a fan of his efforts: Some online commenters have compared it to a memorial for a mass tragedy and noted that black signifies death in China. Meanwhile, out in Water Mill, New York, the indefatigable artist is getting ready to install an enormous photographic work on the facade of the Parrish Art Museum, the New York Times reports. It will show almost 40 running children, and JR told the paper that he was “really trying to capture that moment of lightness and innocence of all children before the weight of the world falls on them.”

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