Enter Here: Mycenae’s Gateway to Fear Mycenaean Greece, especially as materialized at Mycenae and Tiryns, rewards an approach that treats architecture and portable objects as a single political language rather than separate categories of evidence.

This January I’m tripling every “Cup of Coffee” for survivor services. Last year it became personal. Since Oct 2025, Trump has cut funding to 100+ programs for shelter, legal aid, and counseling. We can’t accept this. buymeacoffee.com/DocBaroque

STOP. Name This Scene. Western narrative art rarely tells a story the way a text does. It does not unfold line by line; it condenses. It selects a charged instant, loads that instant with cues, and expects the viewer to reconstruct what has happened, what is happening, and what is about to happen.

Knossos Didn’t Trap a Monster. It Trained a Society. Minoan palaces have often been approached as spectacular buildings, admired for their size, complexity, and rich decoration.

No Text. No Problem. Here’s How The Story Still Shows Itself. Iconography is the practice of identifying what an image shows; who is present, what episode is represented, and which conventional signs make that recognition possible.

These Faces Refuse You: Cycladic Silence and the Aesthetics of Death Among the most arresting objects of the Early Bronze Age Aegean are Cycladic marble figures and vessels; small enough to be carried, large enough to command attention.

Native Americans pay tribute to Renee Nicole Good, murdered by Trump's ICE terrorists 1/11/26 @2_expat

Know your rights 👇🏼

🚨 REPORT GoFundMe for ICE officer Jonathan Ross Raising $ for “possible legal defense” in the fatal shooting of Renee Good. Unverified claims, no authorization, clear misinformation. Violates GoFundMe rules. REPORT IT. SHARE IT. 📄 How to report below (updated 1/14). [n2112] tinyurl.com/4kb2vfma

Space Doesn’t Welcome You. It Decides If You’re Allowed In. Space does not simply hold art, ritual, or social life. It proposes relationships and makes claims through how it arranges approach, entry, movement, pause, and view.

The State Made Torture Look Like Justice Images of torture and punitive violence have long functioned as instruments of authority. They do not merely show cruelty; they organize it into legible forms that can be recognized, circulated, and absorbed by publics.

Caravaggio at the Morgan Library 🖤

ASKING PRICE ≠ VALUE. LET’S END THIS. The Fastest Way to Lose Money Is to Believe Asking Prices A number is only as defensible as the reality beneath it, and condition is the quickest way to tell whether that reality is being honoured or politely blurred.

The King Rewrote the Body and Called It God The Amarna period stands out in Egyptian art because it makes change visible at the level of line, body, and ritual logic.

Architecture Doesn’t Guide You. It Sorts You. Architecture is a graphic art that becomes a bodily practice. Before a building is inhabited, it is imagined, negotiated, and communicated through drawing types that translate space into decision.

Another reason to love @msrachelforlittles.bsky.social ❤️

Oglala Sioux people getting detained in Minneapolis isn’t a mistake; it’s the blueprint. The fact that tribal lawyers are scrambling just to locate them should terrify everyone.

The Native American Caucus condemns the illegal ICE detention of Oglala Sioux relatives and a Red Lake Nation descendant, and interrogation and harassment of countless community members. Deportation of people who have existed on these lands is not only impossible, it is absurd.

The City That Taught Power How to Last New Kingdom Thebes was not merely a backdrop for royal religion; it was an operating system for power.

Stop Standing There. You’re Missing Half the Work Sculpture is often taught as if it were an object that can be mastered from a single fixed position, but the medium itself argues otherwise.

Not Timeless. Not Calm. The Middle Kingdom’s New Kingship Middle Kingdom royal portraiture, especially in the late Twelfth Dynasty, confronts modern viewers with a problem that is as interpretive as it is visual.

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month. I’m tripling every “Cup of Coffee” this month for survivor services. Last year a friend’s 14yr old was trafficked; found after a month. 10 are awaiting trial. Since Oct 2025, 100+ programs lost funding. We can’t accept this: buymeacoffee.com/DocBaroque

Lines That Refuse to Lie Drawing sits at an unusual crossroads in the history of images. It can be a private technology of invention and revision, a public demonstration of mastery, and a finished work whose authority depends precisely on how openly it shows its own thinking.

Pyramids weren’t tombs. They were power. Old Kingdom pyramids and images were not separate categories of architecture and art so much as interlocking technologies for making kingship durable.

Smooth is not innocence. Rough is not honesty. Brushwork is where an artwork gives away its conditions of making. It is the meeting point between an artist’s body, a medium’s physics, and a viewer’s habits of attention.

STOP. “Good Condition” Means Nothing. Galleries explain. Sellers evade. Learn the difference before you pay for it. Condition is not a footnote. It is the object. If you’ve ever read a listing that says “good condition for age” and nothing else, you’ve already met the problem.

The hallway of violence. The gate of wonder. Pick your poison. Imperial power in first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia did not simply announce itself. It was staged.

Medium Is Power. Period. Art history often treats medium as the container and meaning as the content, as if an image could simply move from stone to paint to textile to screen without changing its social life.

Visual Alchemist: How Gus Van Sant Redefined Film, Photography, and Painting Gus Van Sant (born July 24, 1952, in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American director and writer widely recognized for films that foreground marginalized and isolated characters

Does this give everyone a free pass????

If this year keeps spiraling, I’ll be chain-smoking crack by June and washing it down with battery acid.

It’s a comforting myth that we’d be brave in past moral crises, and right now is the real test. Artists are refusing silence and using their work to resist an escalating, dehumanizing immigration crackdown and push people toward action now, not later.

I'm surprised he didn't give him a pardon and a cabinet position. He'd fit right in with this administration. #believesurvivors

The King Did It: How Images Manufacture Authority When art historians speak about an Empire Style in the late third millennium BCE, they are not naming a single uniform look so much as a political solution that repeatedly becomes visible in form.

Spare me the “he has an immigrant wife” defense: that’s not proof of anything except that you’ll use an immigrant woman as a human shield when the mask slips, the same way people say “I’m not racist, I have a Black friend” to excuse their cruelty.

Portland, Oregon, shooting involving federal agents leaves 2 injured share.google/BqdpP2m1FERr...

Monumentality is consent....until it isn’t. Scale is never just a measurement. In art and architecture, size operates as a social claim. It announces who can command space, marshal resources, and set the terms of public attention.

NYC, you know the assignment!

Rolling Authority: Cylinder Seals and the Birth of Administrative Identity in Early Writing Cultures Cylinder seals sit at one of the sharpest intersections in early Mesopotamian history: image-making as governance, craftsmanship as credential, and repetition as a technology of trust.

@cbsnews.com.web.brid.gy has become nothing but a state-run propaganda network. #boycottCBS

Human Trafficking Awareness Month. All January I’m tripling every “Cup of Coffee” for survivor services. Last year a friend’s 14-year-old was taken; she was found after a month, and 10 await trial. Since Oct 2025, Trump cut funding to 100+ programs. buymeacoffee.com/DocBaroque

Visual Gravity: Why You Can’t Look Away Composition is often taught as a set of tasteful arrangements, a matter of good placement and pleasing balance.

@claynobles.bsky.social @wisewonders.bsky.social @gdad1x7.bsky.social @kingresist.bsky.social @pinkfloydlarson.bsky.social @6cats4adomino.bsky.social @archeryfan93.bsky.social @lochnerwalter.bsky.social @dalewalls1.bsky.social @dougieg633.bsky.social @57kev.bsky.social @fiona-webster22.bsky.social 🔄

If It’s Vague, It’s a Risk And you shouldn’t be the one taking it. Transparency is not a “nice extra” in the art and antiques trade. It is the baseline.

Ziggurats as Power Towers: Architecture That Trains Obedience The first Mesopotamian cities did not emerge as neutral containers for human life; they were engineered systems that concentrated people, goods, and authority into forms that could be managed at scale.

Welcome In. Now Try to Leave: The Politics of Entry Space in art is never a neutral container. Even when an image pretends to be a window onto the world, its spatial logic is an authored construction that directs attention, allocates power, and controls emotional distance.

Gold Makes Kings: How Bronze Age Europe Learned to Look Like Power Across Bronze Age Europe, power was rarely abstract. It was hammered, cast, worn, displayed, inherited, broken, repaired, buried, and offered.

Really cool art.

The Tyranny of Illumination: Shadow, Power, and Persuasion A serious formal analysis of light and shadow begins with a reversal of how many viewers are trained to look.