Malcolm Bull

Malcolm Bull’s most recent book is The Concept of the Social.

Oneway to get a perspective on the contemporary art world is to look at two databases, Artprice and Artfacts, which provide rankings of artists based on saleroom prices and exhibition exposure respectively. When I first did this more than ten years ago, the artist who came out on top, outperforming all other living artists when the rankings were combined, was Gerhard Richter. When I...

Thanks to the work of behavioural economists there is a lot of experimental evidence to show what many of us would have suspected anyway: that people are not the rational, utility-maximisers of neoclassical economics, but loss-averse sentimentalists who, faced with even the simplest cognitive problem, prefer dodgy short cuts to careful analysis. Behavioural economists generously...

InThe Passions and the Interests, published in 1977, Albert Hirschman revisited the 18th-century argument that the pursuit of worldly self-interest might be the most effective way of controlling destructive emotions like anger. The pursuit of interests that are constant and predictable potentially offers an escape from the see-saw effect of trying to curb one passion with another. And...

Great Again: America’s Heidegger

Malcolm Bull, 20 October 2016

From 1930​ until the end of his life, Heidegger kept a private philosophical journal in a series of black notebooks. He intended it to be published as the very last of his collected works, but his executors, recognising its importance, have allowed it to appear ahead of schedule. When the first three volumes were published in Germany in 2014, they caused the expected controversy, and...

Letter
Alex Danchev is wrong to suggest that the only evidence of Braque’s reactionary political tendencies is Douglas Cooper’s table talk, as relayed by John Richardson (Letters, 3 April). Others said the same thing. Max Ernst complained to his son that the world was full of the ‘pimps of fascism’: ‘Poor Dalí, he pretends that he is insane and that this entitles him to see mystery in royalty and...

Does marmalade exist?

Terry Eagleton, 27 January 2022

Because the social world is constructed, Malcolm Bull’s sceptical stance can be transformative. You can ‘make less’ of society, in the sense of questioning its apparently inexorable laws; and if...

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Malcolm Bull has written a formidable handbook, for which, I predict, many scholars and lovers of Renaissance art will never forgive him. What he has to say in the end about the revival of the...

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