HeyJaredThe Bystander
An online publication focused on the critique and analysis of art, literature, and a few other subjects.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 26, 2026
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- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
Is it Good to Die for Nothing? (opens the original)
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I’m back to writing One Painting at a Time and for one reason or another, probably idiotic and probably, paradoxically, wise, I have decided on a bit of controversy for this sixth essay. We’re going to look at a painting which tries to hail a virtue which I don’t think is a virtue at all. This namely is devotion so strong it causes useless death, in order to achieve symbolism or something mostly weightless like that. The painting we’ll look at is Faithful unto Death by Edward Poynter. It was pai
Everything you thought you knew about Hunter Biden’s art is WRONG (opens the original)
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In a previous installation of POLITICAL ARTISTS, I spoke of the possibility of the accidentally political artist. Herein, I think we’ve found the perfect specimen for experimentation with this classification. Hunter Biden recently joined Substack. Salutes, three cheers, hip, hip, hurrah, and all the rest to our new Comrade. Fresh as he is to our half-corner of the creative world, he’s not all that fresh to that world more generally. No, he has been in the art-world for a very long time, first, n
Why some books SHOULD be destroyed… (opens the original)
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Friends & Comrade Subscribers, sorry I’ve been gone a while & have left you without much new to read on this or that. I’m retvrning for a moment to let you know about a new book Charlotte Balladine & I put together lately. We assembled it, it must be admitted, for pretty selfish purposes, as we wanted an accessible collection of art we can put up. Essentially, the book is just that: a weighty collection of art-prints which are meant to be removed from the spine of the book and displayed at your
Death of Commissar, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1928 (opens the original)
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As a sort of prelude to an essay I am writing on Russian art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’ve chosen to write three essays, each about a single work by a member of, respectively, the groups Peredvizhniki, Mir Iskusstva, and Proletkult.1 So far, I have written about Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers, and now I am writing about a painting by a member of Mir Iskusstva.*The painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin regularly exhibited works with the art-group Mir Iskusst
Barge Haulers on the Volga, Ilya Repin, 1873 (opens the original)
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Barge Haulers on the Volga is probably the work for which Ilya Repin is most known, both within and without Russia. Well, it was certainly given by the artist the devotion which ought to be due in order to receive celebrity and praise. From 1870 to 1873, the years during which Repin painted the picture, the artist travelled to the Volga many, many times to take sketches of those whom he would depict as the haulers. Rather strangely, most of them weren’t haulers, but characters from the lower dep
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