Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required

Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you’ve read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We’ll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.

Read ahead if you can, but there’s no pressure to be an expert—just bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.

→ Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a New Laocoön.” Partisan Review 7, no. 4 (July–August 1940): 296–310.

What’s the relationship between painting, music, and literature—and why did modernist art care so much about keeping them separate?

Join us as we dig into Clement Greenberg’s 1940 essay “Towards a New Laocoön”, a foundational (and famously opinionated) text in the history of modern art criticism. Greenberg argues that painting should embrace its “essential qualities”—like flatness and color—and resist the temptation to imitate other art forms. Whether you agree, disagree, or want to push the conversation in new directions, this session is all about engaging with the ideas that shaped 20th-century art—and maybe complicating them a little, too.

Let’s read, talk, and think together.