The relationship between the Beach Boys and the Beatles is at the heart of some key issues in pop culture, namely: can pop music function as a tool of knowledge? And if so, how? Author and essayist Pacôme Thiellement has published several articles on pop music, poetry, and black magic; here he offers an exegesis of Beach Boys’ and Beatles’ masterpieces in the same vein as his book on pop and gnosis, Poppermost: Considérations sur la mort de Paul McCartney (Paris: Musica Falsa, 2002), a theory of pop culture elaborated through a comparison of the Beatles and the Residents.

Thiellement has also published an essay on Frank Zappa from an anthropological perspective ( Economie Eskimo: Le rêve de Zappa , Paris: Musica Falsa, 2005) and, most recently, a study of Nerval (L’homme électrique: Nerval et la vie, Paris: Musica Falsa).

Here we are introduced to the work of the uncategorizable Sister Corita Kent through the tale of her rediscovery by another unique artist, Julie Ault, a co-founder of Group Material in New York in 1980. In SISTERS, Patricia Falguières recounts a recent chapter in art history that suggests some reasons for this ineluctable encounter of two major artistic figures: on the one hand, Sister Corita, a nun working in California in the 1950s and ‘60s in a realm somewhere between pop culture, political activism, and religion, and on the other hand Ault, whose artistic, critical and curatorial work constantly raises issues of exhibition, design, and politics.

Falguières is a French historian who teaches at both the École des Hautes Ètudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the École des beaux-arts in Bordeaux.