Category: Art
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but who has seen the work?
The question ‘but who has seen the work?’ points to a broader problem of the public sphere: who is talking to whom, and through which media. If we conceive of the arts broadly enough – to include, say, video games and popular music – their reach is certainly broad, though it always splits along different…
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palpably anxious authors
Interesting and accidental juxtaposition in these two bits from very different scenes and sources, which nonetheless rhyme strongly: In my most cynical moments, I wonder if the return to literary moralism isn’t an evolutionary tactic of publishing’s extant power structures, substituting real-world issues of employment and portfolio identity representation—which do matter—with equitable representation within individual…
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a recurring theme in literary and cinematic history
This piece by Megan Marz at Real Life references a lot of (contemporary, literary?) fiction that I’m completely unfamiliar with, but in the context of a phenomenon I am more familiar with, and very interested in, as both a writer and a human being: the slipperiness and perpetual redefinition of the word story. The whole…
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a means of self-branding, hardened into postures
Offered without gloss or comment, other than “read the whole thing”. Nor will a besieged establishment’s loud existential fears of ‘wokeness’ drown out this simple imperative: that to live attentively in our times, when voices long suppressed are beginning to be heard, is necessarily to awaken to centuries of brutal history. There is no question…
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a Rube Goldberg machine made of fucking corpses
Plenty of critiques of the NFT “art” scene exist, but they—neither unreasonably nor unnecessarily—tend to focus on the (socio)technological side of the phenomenon. These two essays from back in June cropped up on Metafilter yesterday, coming at it from a more art-critical and political-economic angle… and while they’re pretty depressing in many respects, it’s a…