Alexandra Schwartz's New Yorker essay on the sex-recession movie arrives the same week Hyperallergic rounds up six major artworks inspired by the Odyssey, from J.M.W. Turner to Romare Bearden. These feel like opposite ends of a cultural spectrum: one genre is about paralysis and withdrawal, the other about the most famous journey ever written. But they are asking the same question. What does it take to move through the world deliberately when the world keeps generating new reasons to stay home?
The Journey as Cultural Diagnosis
The sex-recession film, per Schwartz, is not really about sex. It is about the collapse of the conditions that make adult risk-taking legible: sustained attention, physical vulnerability, the willingness to be changed by another person. That is also exactly what the Odyssey is about. Odysseus does not want to stay on Calypso's island not because it is bad but because he knows that comfort without navigation is a kind of death. The artworks in the Hyperallergic roundup, particularly Bearden's collaged versions of the myth, translate this into visual terms: the journey is fragmented, non-linear, always partly imaginary, but it remains a journey. The sex-recession films Schwartz describes are about characters who have pre-canceled the journey before it begins.
Fate, Myth, and the Algorithms of Desire
Joshua Rothman's New Yorker essay on fate published this same week argues we would be happier finding meaning through physical things rather than abstractions. This is a surprisingly Odyssean prescription: the hero's journey is relentlessly material, boats and winds and bodies and islands. The sex-recession movie, by contrast, is almost entirely abstract, about the meta-conditions of intimacy rather than intimacy itself. Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez, whose Whitney Biennial performance piece Marina is discussed on Artnet this week, operate in exactly this gap: their work makes the body and desire legible again through performance, refusing the abstraction. Cy Canterel's essay on slop as epistemic solvent offers the darkest frame: when language circulates without a speaker, when content exists without intention, desire itself becomes an orphaned signal. The sex-recession film is what culture looks like when it starts believing its own slop.