Are Many Thumbs the New Talking Heads?
“Criticism is dead!” has been the rallying cry for the past decade as newspapers and journalists alike have been coming to terms with the seismic changes in the publishing world, while the Internet has flowered and bloomed.
Robert Storr, a respected curator and former dean of the Yale School of Art, echoed these sentiments in an interview for Yale Radio a few years ago, declaring journalism to be “the lowest it has ever been,” denouncing the admired critics Roberta Smith and her husband Jerry Saltz as egotists and clowns, respectively. …
One of our greatest fears is being forgotten. It’s a fear that perhaps even supersedes our fear of dying. Pipilotti Rist’s films, on view in a new show at the New Museum entitled “Pixel Forest”, highlight this strange fascination we have with recording ourselves as a way of keeping records of our existence, rather than relying on people’s memories. Video art speaks to this fear of being forgotten, but portraiture is not limited to film as a medium; written autobiography serves as a form of self-portrait, much like a photograph or painting. …
Frank Bruni discusses accuracy and bias in the news age of truthiness
Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. The motto (dryly known as “the three most important things in journalism”) is drilled into the heads of any aspiring journalists. As the lines between judgement, opinion, and fact can become blurred, our choices of words matter, and we are currently in a national debate over a little three-letter word: lie.
Frank Bruni, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times (and former White House reporter) has a problem with the Wall Street Journal’s refusal to label President Trump’s falsities as lies. …
Art has long had a fascination with the ubiquitous disembodied eyes, from the Eye of Horus to the evil eye as a symbol and object. The Surrealist movement explored the “sexual play”[1] of the eye, utilizing different means of depiction, whether by painting, photograph, or sculpture; Rene Magritte memorably played with the visual similarity of breasts and eyes in his famed Le Viol (1934). Images of eyes within art present an interesting dilemma: are we looking at the art, or are we being looked at by the art? …
