Trying to explain Jerry Saltz’ Facebook page to non-art world people is almost harder than explaining Facebook to non-user artists. In The Observer, Leon Neyfakh does a pretty good job explaining size and community involvement on his page, but also the kind of humor about it.
Reviewing Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s recreation of Amsterdam’s red-light district, The Hoerengracht “at least two men writing about the piece have felt the need to share personal stories of interactions with the Amsterdam red-light district, or with prostitutes. Richard Dorment opened his Telegraph review with a paragraph on his schoolboy adventures in Amsterdam (supervised by a Jesuit; what a shame I went to a Church of England school). It is ‘not irrelevant to the exhibition’, he adds. Then Tom Lubbock in the Independent tells us ‘I have never paid for sex. But off the top of my head I can think of three male friends who have, and perhaps still do.’ Too much information. WAY too much. What next, a link to their Facebook pages?” (via.)
No one voice is as valuable to books right now as Jessa Crispin’s: “The New York Times is a gatekeeper, absolutely. And for someone who has so much control over the conversation, you’d think Sam Tanenhaus would be less defensive, and less likely to look like he might leap over the table and rip out the throat of the man who called the Review “middlebrow,” but whatever. If you look at the statistics of what they’re letting inside the gates, though, you see mostly books published by Random House, a very small handful of translated fiction, a disproportionate number of white men…[So] many of the contemporary authors I love are often the ones being kept out of the conversation. They’re rarely, if ever, reviewed in the New York Times, they don’t get splashy features written about them and their night out with their friends. It’s hard for me to get worked up about the decline of reviews when I didn’t care much for them to begin with.”
“When the stock market crashed in October 1929, sound film was younger than YouTube is now.” – A. O. Scott points out in a wonderful essay on hard times and good movies. “Audiences want to be lulled by romance or tickled by comedy, but they also have a hunger to see reality depicted. Above all there seems a universal appetite to see the rawness of the world given the shapely and soothing order conferred by familiar genres.”
“For Popper, all discovery is really just criticism. Although we think of scientific truth as being somehow more stable than literary or cultural truth – literary fashions come and go, but gravity remains – the opposite is actually true. Scientific truth is true precisely because it is open to change, willing to reverse itself and admit its errors. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon will always be a magnificent painting, but a scientific idea that is no longer true…well, what good is that?” – The Frontal Cortex
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