Our Art and Its Texts (or Our Text and Its Art)

by Michael Pepi, December 2012 All around us, criticism is coming to terms with technology. While such a transition invites endless pontification and analysis, the facile narrative that new technology dehumanizes art has long been exhausted. Socrates himself was skeptical of the deleterious effects that a popular innovation—writing—would have on the polis. Instead of resurrecting bromides…

This is Not a Trend Piece: The Evolution of a Brooklyn Church

by Steven Thomson, December 2012 The German Evangelical Lutheran St. Mark’s Church at 626 Bushwick Avenue is not a church. Although constructed between 1885 and 1892 in a Victorian Gothic style by the local immigrant population, the edifice of Nova Scotia sandstone, granite and terra cotta has become the hub of a one-time underground visual…

Appropriate Images

by Ian Wallace, December 2012 Kids born in the digital age grow up with access to high-quality color photographs and videos of themselves, self-images that are not tied to the past, as portraiture once was, but that can also be images of the immediate present. The iPhone’s screen remakes the mirror image, and flips it…

“Tweet” Pieces: Semiotic Validation #TypographyAsArt

by Stavros Pavlides, December 2012 If the Miami Art week is to serve as a barometer by which one assesses the art world’s climate, then undeniably there has been a glacial thawing of fonts, type and disembodied statements into the tide of visual arts this year. Naturally, all forms of fine art made their appearance,…

AIDS 2.0

by Avram Finkelstein, December 2012 Even in the earliest moments of AIDS, and from deep within its swirling vortex, the outlines of its cultural meaning were detectable. Playing out as it did in the public sphere, it was impossible to overlook. So assumptions about it formed quickly in our shared spaces, and almost as immediately,…

ACT UP 25: Of and on the Political Act in Art

by Anthony Romero, December 2012 For 25 years ACT UP has been working as a direct action advocacy group to improve the lives of those living with AIDS. Like many organizations working against predominant power dynamics and systemic prejudices around what some have perceived to be a minorities’ disease, language that Susan Sontag identified as…

Point and Shoot: Photography as a Survival Strategy in the Work of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin

by Anna Khachiyan, December 2012 There’s a point in Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971), about midway through, where the pictures stop abruptly, giving way to a page that’s blank save for an inscription: “Death is more perfect than life.” It’s a quote that I can conjure straight from memory without looking at a citation, partly because it’s shocking,…

On the Occasion of Our Last Issue

by Danny Kopel, December 2012 Dear Reader, In my last letter this spring, I wrote to tell you about the exciting merger of our Quarterly edition and our Monthly issues into a single unified publication that would marry our Quarterly’s spirit of academic inquiry with our Monthly’s zest for all things current in the art…