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on the limits of art

I haven’t read the Haruki Murakami story Drive My Car adapts but Murakami’s locus of themes seems apparent: the centrality of sex, long opaque stories seeming to beg for but ultimately deny wider resonances, the intertextuality (especially with canonical western literature). 

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on skepticism, art, and the museum in the 21st century

Image: Barbara Kruger’s rendering of exhibition entryway at the Art Institute of Chicago, Digital image courtesy of the artist/Source photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

Kruger’s not so retrospective retrospective, currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, affords an opportunity to reconsider why it is we go to museums and what we do when we get there. 

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on the nearly nothing and the persistence of composition

Image: Robert Ryman, Twin, 1966, oil on canvas. Museum of Modenr Art, New York.

Work in which seemingly nothing happens is almost always more interesting than work in which a great deal happens. Actually, maybe that’s not exactly it.

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nostalgia and the self

In Dubravka Ugrešić ’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, she attributes the following quote to the Russian literary theorist and critic Victor Shklovsky: “I have no desire to construct a plot. I am going to write about things and thoughts. To compile quotations.”  

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