Category: book reviews

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Two Ways of Avoiding Clement Greenberg: Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ “Art Czar: the Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg” and Robert Storr’s “No Joy in Mudville: Greenberg’s Modernism Then and Now”

Max E. Katz
On July 22nd, the carcass of a lion’s mane jellyfish washed ashore a New Hampshire beach. The jellyfish’s detached tentacles still managed to sting swimmers, evacuating the beach and sending four to the emergency room. The dead thing stings.

Clement Greenberg died sixteen years ago, already a relic. But death does not deter Greenberg’s [...]

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The Compromiser; On Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism”

Mike Yong

Bravado, nihilism, and emptiness mark the work of Robert Somol, an architectural theorist who has paradoxically made a career of undermining architectural theory’s hold on architecture. While Somol is styled as a theoretician, his work never rises above what can only be called the sloppy and superficial use of jargon. He once celebrated, for [...]

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An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus

James Moskovic
Question: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think that is?
Answer: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some…people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like [...]

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Book Review: Hanne Darboven • Cultural History 1880-1983

by Bret Schneider
book review:
Dan Adler
Hanne Darboven, Cultural History 1880-1983
Published by Afterall

What ever happened to bureaucratic art?  For one anti-magical moment in the 1960’s a handful of artists seemed obsessed with mimicking the most banal aspects of everyday life.  Sol Lewitt, Mel Bochner, Seth Siegelaub, and Robert Smithson each embraced from time to time generic [...]

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Deterioration, They Said; The Contemporary Rite of Passage

Bret Schneider
(Review of Deterioration, They Said; a catalog from the exhibition at the Migros Museum.  Published by JRP Ringier.)

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art”
Theodor Adorno
I don’t trust anyone who says they like Ryan Trecartin’s videos. Trecartin tenders a postmodern world rupturing into arbitrary ritual, capable of any [...]

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Book Review: Individual Methodology – Harald Szeemann

Complete with copied documents, rare photographs, interviews with personal acquaintances and Szeemann himself, and much other ephemera, Individual Methodology compiles a comprehensive documentative survey of a man who contributed more to our confused contemporary situation today than perhaps anyone.

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Book Review: Miwon Kwon; One Place After Another

we need to be able to think the range of the seeming contradictions and our contradictory desires for them together; to understand in other words, seeming oppositions as sustaining relations.

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Review: Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of New Music

As a mass ornamentation, it summons the audience to rally together to annihilate their own subjectivity