The scholar Michael Warner writes that "with email, bureacratic memos and love notes, the object of address is understood to be an identifiable person or office." What you've just published on your blogs, your editorial statements, are different: they are examples of an individual aesthetic position addressed to a public sphere. "For this other class of writing contexts," Warner continues, "including literary criticism, journalism, theory, advertising, fiction, drama, the available addressees are essentially imaginary, which is not to say unreal. The people, scholarship, posterity, the younger generation, the nation, the Left, the movement, the world, the vanguard, the enlightened few, public opinion, humanity, my fellow queers: these are all publics. They are in principle open-ended. Even declaiming [your editor's statement] to a group of intimates, [you] could still be heard as addressing a public. We'd then recognize ourselves as strangers even when we know each other."

But such a conception of the public sphere as aesthetic opinion's object of address is today challenged by a number of forces, including increased hybridic identity, transnational mobility and global capitalism. Bill Reading describes two alternatives to the more homogeneous, nation-based public sphere: one is the scene of dissensus, the other is the global consumer marketplace. What's the difference? And would your art magazine function differently when moved from one to the other?

an instance of a "durable" becoming rubbish (rather than vice versa)

To prove the deceit of the conservative Spanish Church, anarchists exhume sainted nuns & priests from catacombs around Barcelona and publicly display the rotting remains during the 1936 uprising.

Corin Hewitt's simultaneously studio & post-studio production (of continuous trash? data? both?)

Judith Rodenbeck on Corin Hewitt's Seed Stage (Modern Painters March 2009): "The artist carried on his daily activities, eating, reading, cooking, moving objects about, storing them or retrieving them, arranging and photographing them in a kind of continuous puttering. He also tended boxes of worm-filled compost, grew vegetables from the seeds of those he’d eaten, or returned leavings (fruit skins as well as photographs) to the boxes of mulch. These activities in turn yielded photographs of maquettes made with foodstuffs and modeling putty and anything else at hand. The latter images, at least those that survive, serve as the documentary residue of the piece itself. Scattered around the periphery of the gallery, the photographs functioned as 'seeds,' inasmuch as while they emerged as the 'fruit' of the labors taking place inside the studio they were often as not returned to that space to be rephotographed, or bottled, or mulched and, by implication, to serve as the visual ground for new elements. Nothing went unused, everything provided fodder. Hewitt recasts the artist in terms of agency rather than pure creativity. Each time a lump of colored putty is returned to its color wheel, the base color moves more toward gray. Yet Hewitt demurs: 'Very few things to me seem abject.'"

Sunday's New York Times on Newsweek's redesign

Kristeva, Douglas, Moser questions here:

Manovich, Deleuze questions here:

Is the new ubiquity of cellphones making our culture more oral than literate? And if oral culture entails more "liveness," does it also make culture more essentialist and symbolic, less constructed, collaged and allegorical?

Sunday's New York Times on The Lost Art of Reading Aloud

McLuhan, Scannell, Ong questions here:

Barthes "It is impossible that words duplicate the image; in the movement from one structure to the other second signifieds are inevitably developed."

Casey Lurie, Wedding Photo from the New York Times, 2009 (currently on view at the Block). Casey says about this piece, "I came across an image on the New York Times website. In it, a young couple on their wedding day stand in front of a painted-sky backdrop in a photo studio, he wearing a formal Marine Corps uniform and she in a white wedding gown. A rather mundane photograph except for the fact that the groom’s face appears to be severely disfigured. It was part of a slide show of images related to the war in Iraq. I had a difficult time processing this image not only because it is clearly unsettling but, more than that, because in the slide show format it was sandwiched between other violent and disturbing images from the war. There was no way for me to really comprehend this image given the context. I wanted to know more about the couple: Tyler Ziegel and Renee Kline were high school sweethearts, and after high school Tyler joined the Marine Corps and was soon sent on his first tour of duty in Iraq. Upon his return Tyler and Renee were engaged, however he returned to Iraq for his second tour before they wed. Five months into his second tour, Tyler was part of a patrol convoy in the Anbar province when a suicide bomber blew up his truck. The next day he was flown to an Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas where he would undergo over 50 surgeries and 19 months of rehabilitation. He lost sight in his right eye, his ears were burned off, and some of his right hand and most of his left arm were amputated. In one of his surgeries part of his skull was removed and implanted into the fat of his torso to keep it moist and viable. Renee stayed with him for the duration of his rehabilitation, and soon after their return home to Metamora, Illinois they were married."

Barthes, Benjamin questions here:

Clarke, Patterson, Granovetter questions here:

Gadamer, Burger questions here:

Kate Ericson & Mel Ziegler's House Monument, 1986

Virginia Heffernan in January 20, 2008 NY Times Magazine

A work today must become a franchise, generate tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There must be “Such and Such: Origins” and “Such and Such Touchdown” for PlayStation. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of her or his work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise. But it’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol”) and more avant-garde (Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class novel and guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity. It shuts fans out. Today a wiki has to form on the Web, along with fan fiction (viewer-written stories that take off on the canon). The narrative needs a set of logical givens, the kind that are a staple of sci-fi and fantasy, which empower fans to speculate about outcomes. It cannot be like fine embroidery or precise machinery, which extinguishes the desire in laypeople to try it themselves. It cannot bring on museum fatigue, a sense of uselessness and enervation in the face of art that doesn’t need us. Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art. Without online dialogues and events, message boards and chat rooms and video games, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings. Art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

Mouffe, S/Z questions here:

Paradigm & Syntagm

We've heard Rosalind Krauss describe as highly paradigmatic Frank Stella's 1960s paintings. What would a highly syntagmatic art look like? How would it differ in its make-up and effects? And which is more prevalent today?

Now that museums are invaded more by the high turnover rhythms of the market...

Now that permanent hierarchies have been increasingly replaced by more flexible networks...

Now that we live in a world supposedly more narrowcasted than broadcasted, more about DIY prosumers than passive consumers...

While you read this on your computer screen, you are aware of all the other things you are not reading, have yet to read, have decided not to read. Rather than conserve its tradition, media expends itself endlessly. Media runs nonstop, in all directions, whether anyone's listening or watching or not. And even when somebody does listen or watch, not everything available through media can be heard or seen, since there is never just one program or piece of information but many, an entire range of sites and channels and outlets broadcasting simultaneously. So that paying attention to one means not paying attention to any other. Against the static spatiality of the museum or the library, media pits temporal flow; and against the centripetal and self-preserving pull of tradition there is media's centrifugal counterforce, the lateral spread of its bandwidth, a motor mouth that talks too much at once, the continuous, excessive dispersing and exhausting of its news and entertainments.

Silverman, Barthes questions here:

Is Wolfgang Tillmans a traditionalist, a flaneur, a hipster or a shock-addled urban zombie?