Dilettante Army

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Dilettante Army

Dilettante Army is a website for short-form cultural and creative writing from a community dedicated to creating a communal discussion and body of work.

Dilettante Army is a coalition of thinkers who dabble passionately in a litany of disciplines. Our army consists of writers, artists, and critics who privilege everything from the fanciful to the cerebral with a healthy dose of snark. In 18th century Italy, a ‘dilettante’ was a passionate lover and supporter of music. Since then, it’s become a derogatory term for people who aren’t dedicated or ser

ious. We’d like to reclaim this word as a badge of honor. Dilettantes are freelancers, interns, students, adjuncts, and anyone else who doesn’t work in the culture industry full-time but still pursues their projects with hapless fervor. This website features short-form cultural and creative writing from our dilettante contributors. DA aims to underscore the free-floating status of cultural texts, letting them link together rhizome-style to acknowledge and inform their neighbors. As the site grows, you should be able to search the database and find a group of voices chiming in any given subject. Posts are short and to-the-point in order to allow readers to interject; you can submit your response at the bottom of the page. If it’s relevant, your response will be posted on its own instead of being lost in the bowels of a comments thread. It’ll help keep the dialogue front and center. The more people who use the site, the bigger it’ll grow and the sooner we can take over the world.

12/09/2025

On Tuesday, ’s new issue, “Ekphrasis,” came out, with Krushna Dande’s essay “Mass Murder as Memetic Warfare.” On Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Dande offers a compelling framework for understanding the paranoid over-reading of memes and inside jokes performed by politically radical online communities, a “vertiginous swell of context,” that finds meaning in every scrap of terrorist content. While terrorist killings often do not have politically coherent goals, they do have, as Dande says. “memetic, symbolic goals.”

The scope of a shooter’s aims makes it difficult for journalists to cover them responsibly, because any attention paid to them furthers those aims. To refuse to discuss them, however, also gives them something they want—it make us fear their names. How can we make terrorism legible?

Link to “Ekphrasis” in bio.

09/09/2025

Our Fall 2025 issue, “Ekphrasis,” is out now!

Ekphrasis is the literary description of a visual phenomenon, a practice that dates back at least to the Iliad and a focus of this little magazine for almost as long. The term is most commonly applied to poetry composed in response to a work of art, but any translation of pictures into words is a mechanism for dispelling the illusion of the image’s immediacy.

The breadth of this issue points to anxiety about a climate that pushes for fast action and immediate certainty, making interpretation seem a rare luxury. Something is wrong with judgment, and this wrongness seems fundamentally linked to the murky quality of the information environment and the tyrannical primacy of the image.

By shifting registers, ekphrasis requires a type of aesthetic judgment not always accomplished through the visual. It is a machine for realizing that we are all capable of misreadings, and it also reminds us of our own capacity to read well, despite a world drowned in images and over-conviction. Your reading may or may not be better than the last one, but it also isn’t the final one (which is both an admonition and a comfort).

The words of “Ekphrasis” have been turned back into images by 🫟🖌️

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Kate Nesin writes the image description as “disability ekphrasis”

• Emily Singeisen contextualizes AI’s exploitation of language within a very old fantasy: the death drive

• Andrew McInnes asks: does John Keats want to f**k that Grecian urn?

• Julia Alekseyeva looks at filmic ekphrasis in Isaac Julien’s “Once Again… (Statues Never Die)” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey.”

• Lauren Camp plots the ocean with mapmaker Marie Tharp

• Krushna Dande investigates white supremacy’s paranoiac overreading of memes and videos

• Louis Shankar reframes David Wojnarowicz’s writing about his own art work

• Robby Bishop contemplates the photobook through Alec Soth’s guided YouTube readings

• Bruce M. King hears the Shield of Achilles, ekphrasis’s mythic origin, through Achilles’s wordless scream

10/06/2025

Call for Submissions! Fall 2025, “Ekphrasis”

How do you know when you’ve really seen something? Beleaguered by the 24-hour news cycle and endless scrolling, we are overwhelmed with images, so many that we see each one only for a moment, flashing by but never captured. The latest AI nightmare, the sketchily provenanced war photograph, the doctored image of “gang tattoos” that seem to prove someone’s allegiances—we’ve all seen these things, but only some of us (or perhaps none of us) have understood them.

A lack of time and space to interpret images factors into our vulnerability to misinformation and a decline in media literacy, conditions with profound social consequences. If we see the same things but cannot agree on a shared reality, where has the visual mechanism failed?

We believe that ekphrasis can mitigate this crisis. Ekphrasis is the literary description of a visual phenomenon, a practice that dates back at least to the Iliad and a focus of this little magazine for almost as long. The term is most commonly applied to poetry composed in response to a work of art, but any translation of pictures into words is a mechanism for dispelling the illusion of the image’s immediacy.

Dilettante Army invites scholarly contributions about ekphrasis. Topics might include: words after pictures, words in pictures, words instead of pictures, Ways of Seeing, the Shield of Achilles, AI, disruption, the grindset, imagination, distraction, misreading, (historic) revisionism, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” displays of academic prowess, media literacy, performative yearning, lost originals, fashion do’s and dont’s, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the long now, immediacy, the death of painting, the death of photography, visibility mandates, Glissant’s “opacity,” abstraction, platform capitalism, common sense, mediation.

Pitches are due Monday, June 23. For more information on how and what to submit, please see the full call for submissions (link in bio).

Image: Sir James Thornhill, “Thetis Accepting the Shield of Achilles from Vulcan,” c. 1710.

06/05/2025

Spring 2025, “Rebuilding Year,” is out now!

After a storm at sea, salvage washes up on the beach. The post-shipwreck project becomes seeing what you can save from the receding tide. A long terrain is in front of us, laced with the wreckage of our failed forays, waiting for us to rebuild.

In sports, a “rebuilding year” is the period of time that follows a major change. If Walter Benjamin had been a sports fan instead of a snowglobe enthusiast, he might have used “rebuilding year” instead of Rettung (salvage) as a metaphor for recombining the wreckage of history. You say something is a rebuilding year when you know that there are no victories in your immediate future, and so instead of chasing near-term returns, you choose to focus on building strength for future fights. Get a new coach; flush your roster; drill the basics; go to ground. Rebuilding Year is about the feelings that wash out when the tides turn against you—grief, weariness, and determination. It’s the feeling after upheaval, after your companions-in-arms have departed, after a regime change.

Picking our way across the damp sand, we are looking for flotsam and jetsam we can use.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Dania Rajendra learns from American football and coaches the Left on updating its playbook.

• Kate Thomas celebrates gay soup and community building at .

• peers into a supremely evil object, the Trump-Netanyahu handbuzzer joke, and its fallout.

• Sam Thompson recuperates the radical potential of EXTREME cleaning videos on YouTube and foments the social strike.

• excavates layers of glitter and imperialism in the Itaewon, the “international neighborhood” that Seoul rebuilt.

The physics-defying constructions in “Rebuilding Year” illustrations have been salvaged and remade by

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Hail, Dilettantes!

Dilettante Army is a coalition of thinkers who dabble between disciplines: critical theory, visual culture, and history. In 18th century Italy, a ‘dilettante’ was a passionate lover and supporter of music. Since then, it’s become a derogatory term for people who aren’t dedicated or serious. We’d like to reclaim this word as an apt description for many art workers. As academia and the art world march hand-in-hand through late capitalism, making work on those fields more and more precarious, we find ourselves in need of new models of professional practice. Dilettantes are freelancers, interns, students, adjuncts, and anyone else who pursues their practice outside the white cube or ivory tower.