Theodor Adorno, your illustrator is here.

Walking into this recent show of Joachim Bandau’s work, one could not help but recall how Adorno’s thinking, and that of some of his Frankfurt School colleagues, was characterized by axioms of exuberant pessimism: Humanity is deformed by a military-industrial cage; sexuality has been harnessed by the culture industries; our senses have been dulled by the media machine; our consumer society is nothing other than a cultural mausoleum, richly decked out with grave goods. Adorno dispensed his inexhaustible despair in aphorisms; he defined modern music—one

This small exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where curator Adrian Sudhalter presented a meticulous reconstruction of Tristan Tzara’s book project Dadaglobe, uncovered two urgent desires on Tzara’s part: He aimed at an artistic production that could circulate, not only with mercurial ease, incorporating diverse forms and materials, but also—as the title suggests—on a truly planetary scale. Tzara planned to publish the anthology in 1921, conceiving it in close collaboration with Francis Picabia, but it was never realized. Both Tzara and Picabia were prolific editors of magazines, a