I read Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by TJ Clark

A bunch of deep-ass Art History Classic™ analysis of some great paintings where scenes of miracles, eternal life, etc are mingled with the tradition of realism in European painting-- where the material and here and now inevitably intrudes and interacts with the ideal. The chapter on Breugel's Land of Cockaigne obviously appealed the most to me, and did not disappoint, but even the ones on artists and works I felt less strongly about were really informative, philosophically knotty and rich. He ties all this into a politics of leftist pessimism/cynicism, which was a little tough for my natural utopian thinking to take but again, really meaty and provocative. It made me realize how impoverished, in the sense of reducing visual or multimedia works to like... syntactical "content" which then determines analysis, a lot of criticism is across the board nowadays, since everything has to be a 1000 word post that leads up to the Why X is the Y We Need Right Now (or not) argument. It felt like a challenge to read some stuff that makes deep formal and psychological observations/leaps/questions instead... can I do something like that?