Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est…
Movie studios favoring familiarity and profitability over artistry is nothing new or particularly innovative. At the moment, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are on strike against Hollywood’s profit-driven and margin-squeezing madness, throwing the craven greed of the executive class into even sharper…
A photographer is refusing a prestigious award after admitting to being a “cheeky monkey” and generating the prize-winning image using artificial intelligence. The German artist Boris Eldagsen revealed on his website that he was not accepting the prize for the creative open category, which he won at the Sony world photography awards. The winning photograph…
The California painter and critic Manny Farber extolled “termite art” as occurring “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” That need for art to be ugly, to go where it is not wanted,…
“When you hear someone playing a piano, would you ever ask if the piano is the artist?” asks Mario Klingemann, an AI artist whose work Memories of Passerby I recently sold at auction for £40,000. Though his answer is ‘no,’ it may not actually be so simple, since instead of an inanimate machine, his medium…
Mitchell Grafton, Updating Vermeer. 2012 We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming. So let me rephrase, we live at the end of an era characterized by relentless anxiety around the self as…
With the rise of AI personalities like Lil Miquela, who can be anyplace at any time, the future landscape of fame is here. So where do humans fit into it? Lil Miquela herself weighs in. Michael Jackson and Lil Miquela. Miquela wears hat and vest by PRADA. Photograph from Getty Images from the Getty Images Entertainment collection,…
Does anybody else feel as though Kanye West has been taking daily strides toward being more like Donald Trump? The rapper, producer, designer, and issuer of crazy and disturbing contributions to social discourse recently announced his intention to get into architecture (via Twitter, the preferred platform for people who hate facts). This new venture is…
It’s almost a like competition. Time after time, manga and anime creators have one-upped each other, escalating the arms race that will one day destroy us all. The weapons here aren’t of the ballistic variety — they’re girls. Or rather, things that are not girls that also happen to look just like girls. “Moe anthropomorphism”…
Pascal Parrot / Sygma / Sygma / Getty To mourn Philip Roth is also to mourn a particular kind of literary celebrity. If you Google the phrase literary lion, here is one of the first definitions that will be returned to you for the effort: “Noun: a noted author who has reached celebrity status.” And,…