PUBLIC LECTURE by Dr. Ara H. Merjian (New York University)

ABSTRACT Diderot’s famous Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who See (1749) improbably names moral apathy as the natural inclination of the blind, whose inability to see leads Diderot to "suspect them of being, in general, unfeeling toward their fellow men." To what extent have twentieth- and twenty-first-century aesthetics elaborated strategies of representing connections to bodies unseen or unacknowledged? What, in artistic terms, might constitute a phenomenology of distance and implication, as it relates to the witnessing of history or micro-history? And in what sense does an ostensibly interconnected globalization belie an indifference which, Carlo Ginzburg writes, "already implies a form of complicity"?

BIO Ara H. Merjian is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History, as well as Director of Undergraduate Studies. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, 2014), and the forthcoming Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960-1975, for which he won a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. His writing has appeared in publications such as Grey Room, Oxford Art Journal, Art in America, The Getty Research Journal, Word & Image, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is currently at work on a study of de Chirico’s twentieth-century legacies, as well as a volume on the theory of Free-Indirect Style as it relates to modernist painting.

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