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Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Feb 27, 2016

The postmodern attitude

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Mar 3, 2016

A man bound me with boards

One of my enemies ended my life, sapped my world-strength
Afterward soaked me in water.
Set me in sun, where soon I lost the hairs that I had.
And then the hard knife-edge cut me,
Fingers folded me and feather of bird traced
All over my tawny surface with drops of delight…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Jan 30, 2016

Adding to design education

[T]here are other things that must be added to the education of designers to enable them to participate as something other than visual packagers […]: writing as a means of conceptual and expressive development; techniques of verbal expression, rhetoric, narrative and storytelling…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 23, 2015

The spectral mimicry of things said to the mind

“The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” The rhythm of the sentence not only propels the sentence forward, it helps to organize its significant units — its phrases and clauses. The reader is made, not merely to see…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

Not to explain away contradictions, but rather to multiply them

Through the intervention of the Eames Office, IBM began a vast, two-decade-long campaign in the late 1950s to naturalize the computer. This campaign was conducted in multimedia barrage, beginning with exhibitions and…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Feb 13, 2016

Keys vs. combinations

[T]he law has always drawn a distinction between objects and what’s in your brain. And even though the key to a lock and a series of numbers that’s the combination to a combination lock are functionally the same thing, the law draws a distinction and says that under the Fifth Amendment you…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Jan 21, 2016

Conceptual pricing

I was making conceptual and ephemeral works, but I needed money to survive. So I proposed an I.O.U work to Leo Castelli. Borrowing money would be the content of the work — a transaction between artist, collector and dealer. He said: ‘We don’t borrow money, Billy. We make money.’ On my 1979–80…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Jan 2, 2016

So much more than the world could offer

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect — we even demand — that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

On sliminess

At this instant I suddenly understand the snare of the slimy: it is a fluidity which holds me and which comprises me; I can not slide on this slime, all its suction cups hold me back; it can not slide over me, it clings to me like a leech. The sliding however is not simply denied as in the case of the…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 28, 2015

A serious history of co-optation

It is more than a little odd that, in this age of nuance and negotiated readings, we lack a serious history of co-optation, one that understands corporate thought as something other than a cartoon. Co-optation remains something we vilify almost automatically; the…

These were the top 10 stories published by Quote Unquote; you can also dive into yearly archives: 2015, 2016.

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Quote Unquote

Clips and collected ideas from a life of reading on- and off-screen

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