From The Point, and Wolfgang Tillmans, to The Drift and Adam Curtis. And yes, the names are important. Aesthetics are the manifestation of ethics; they show you for what you are. What are the "little magazines" now?

On Curtis, Mirowski, Slobodian, Mark Fisher et al., the whole sorry lot, Start here, also recently, or here, to 2014, and further back. Also recently, Mike Davis.  Aestheticized politics: collapsing the distinction between illustration and art, between an interest in ideas and an awareness of their relation to the world. 

Curtis is a political romantic who uses irony only to put himself beyond irony. He refers to desperation and nihilism to indulge without admitting the indulgence, and the denial magnifies it. If art is reification, it describes the maker's desires as the desires of a person, not absolutely as the state of the world. Art is response; it's not the world. The little space between the two is irony.  Curtis collapses that space. What's left is simple determinism.

 The author at The Drift

I’m a writer and PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. My research and writing deal with the changing contours and textures of aesthetic experience in the contemporary. I write about a diverse range of objects, from autofiction to fan fiction; from latex sculptures to chill lo-fi beats.

My academic writing has appeared in Post45, Swamp Souths: Literary and cultural ecologies (LSU Press 2020) and A Gallery Guide to the Melancholy Museum (Cantor Arts Center 2019). I’ve also written cultural criticism and reviews for n+1, The Drift, Chicago Review, The Baffler, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places.

I occasionally make music, which you can find here. 

The sweet smiling portrait and the music just nail it.