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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. […]

Return of the Prodigal

I’ve begun to consider the possibility that my brain does manage to wrap itself around these evolutionary shifts in digital technology without extreme difficulty. Which in turn suggests that perhaps this recurrent process helps to keep my brain active and young (or, more precisely, youth-like) by pushing me to learn new skills, to replace old habits with new or revised ones, and in one way or another to get some exercise for the mind. In short, I’ve begun to weigh the mental-health benefits of living la vida digital, with its steady reconfiguring of my neural pathways. […]

Election 2012: Image World (19)

Sigmund Freud, who visited this country only once, in 1909, famously declared, “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.” The jury’s still out on that. But the nation’s first Black president winning a second term despite a collapsed economy isn’t the stuff of dreams. It’s absolutely real; and, to whatever extent photographs still function as evidence today, we have the pictures to prove it. […]