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There Will Be Ink (3)

The compulsory worldwide education for which Malala Yousafzai called in her U.N. speech, though it will surely involve physical books and paper and pens, will rely increasingly on digital tools: computers, the internet, digitized books and periodicals accessed through digital libraries. And I’m convinced that the future of the illustrated book lies in the ebook or some other form of electronic delivery. […]

There Will Be Ink (2)

I can bemoan the erosion of the analog library that I grew up loving as a quasi-sacral space, a physical site that embodied our cultural commitment to preserving our accumulated knowledge as imbedded in words on paper. And, at the same time, watching the children of my community surfing the net in our new postmodern branch library, I can also say, “Just look how beautiful it is. […]

There Will Be Ink (1)

Our newly renovated neighborhood library, a mashup of late 19th- and early 21st-century architectural styles,offers 40 computer stations and 10 loaner laptops with online access and printing, free wifi, DVDs and CDs. A perfect example of the postmodern library. It even has books. […]

How to Talk Through Your Hat (5)

Can it be sheer coincidence that this standardization of thought and expression in both visual and verbal modes came out of the same environment? I think not. They emerged at almost exactly the same time, from within the same hothouse ― the international post-secondary art-education system. Their virtually simultaneous birth merely manifests that sheltered microcosm’s belated recognition of something the hardscrabble working class has known for millennia: bullshit makes effective and inexpensive fuel, and if everyone’s using it the smell soon goes unnoticed. […]

How to Talk Through Your Hat (4)

Most art-related press releases get written by people who aren’t just art-world wannabes but individuals who have never laid eyes on the work in question. That is, they’re exercises in “How to Write about Art You Haven’t Seen.” That’s because the publicity cycle in the art world runs on a three-month time lag. Let me explain. […]