The great thing about a television program devoted to the critique of images is that it is, necessarily, composed largely of images itself. That’s what makes looking at “Consuming Images,” a PBS special with Bill Moyers from 1990, such an interesting experience. (The whole thing is available in six parts here, as part […]
I ordered Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography some time ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it until recently. For some reason–and maybe I just haven’t heard about it?–Flusser doesn’t seem to have much of a U.S. following, which may have kept me from delving into the book as quickly as […]
AFC pointed me toward this great story: The Art Newspaper reports that Sotheby’s and Damien Hirst are planning an exhibition and auction of new work by Hirst this September, bypassing the traditional gallery system and heading straight to the auction block. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the centerpiece of the show (entitled “Beautiful […]
Since March, 291 has been dedicating posts to each individual stage of the “Click!” exhibition process. Now that the show is actually mounted and hung, I’d love to write an in-depth review of the results. At the moment, however, I’m talking with an editor about covering the show for a print venue, so […]
Image from “On the Beauty of Absence.”
Theorists have made a fuss for a while now about how the body is “inscribed” or made “legible” by society. Here’s the process in real-time: a new tool allows police to identify suspects based on tattoos, scars, and other visible bodily markers.
Square America is probably the most thoughtfully […]
I realize it’s taken awhile to catch up with the second part of my write-up. Mitchell was as engaging a speaker as he is a writer, but I’m omitting some of what he said in this paraphrase. He spent some time explicating a few image categories that Rancière outlines in The Future of […]
I’m finally getting around to posting notes about “The Future of the Image,” a lecture panel at Columbia University last week featuring visual theorists W. J. T. Mitchell and Jacques Rancière. For an academic lecture, the place was packed–I arrived 15 minutes early and got one of the last seats. Many people were […]
