Posts tagged Reviews
J. G. Ballard Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton
“The young Ballard was a movie buff who loved film noir, for unfolding in “a psychological space that existed first and foremost in the characters’ minds.” Pop art rocked his world, and he would later stage his own scandalous exhibition of wrecked cars as a dry run forCrash (1973), about a group of auto-accident fetishists, his most notorious novel and most radical liebestod. But while the other arts fed his fiction (and vice versa, to judge by his influence on music and film, from Joy Division, fellow connoisseurs of urban blight who named a song after his experimental opus The Atrocity Exhibition, to David Cronenberg, who adapted Crash and counts as a true kindred spirit), Ballard’s relationship with literature has always been complicated. He “read far too much, far too early,” and soon realized that his early literary heroes—Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway—were not to be aped. The dominant midcentury view of the English novel as “a moral criticism of life,” per F. R. Leavis, was to him hopelessly insular, and his lifelong separation from the London literati—aside from the mention of a passing friendship with Kingsley Amis—is a point of pride (he says the last book party he attended was in the 1970s)”
Rhetoric of The Image
“Curiously, audiences (or customers) remain a spectral presence in both books. In O’Neill’s tract, there is no sustained discussion of the public, which seems to be conceived of as a black-box unknown, another integral and indeterminate manifestation to set alongside the artwork and the event, and that may be created by them. Smith notes that general viewers remain a systematic omission in current curatorial thinking; his audiences (in what he admits is an ideal description) have novel works placed before them and are ‘disinterested.’ This Kantian description, while in apparent tension with the virtues of multiplicity and mobility, allows them to be seen as placeholders for autonomous bourgeois individuals, free to think and feel without restraint before the unbound work of art.”
iPhone 4S Review Round-Up: The best of these reviews I suppose, would be by Mr. Stephen Fry. Also, New iPhone Conceals Sheer Magic (I hate when they do this, because it makes me want to buy a new iPhone and I don’t NEED a new one, damn it.) Apple’s Siri Is as Revolutionary as the Mac. Grrr… (yes that is a segment of an old film poster, Klute).
Luc Sante Talks The Miscellaneous Prose of Novelist, Memoirist, Critic, and First-Class Noticer Geoff Dyer.
“…Which is to say that instead of being agglutinations of data, his works are characterized by the fact that they are writing—that their insights and their expression are inseparable and maybe indistinguishable. They are the opposite of Wikipedia: By design, they tell you as much about the author as about the ostensible subject. It’s like with music—you want the voice before you want the song, don’t you? Or do you just indifferently punch up any old cover of ‘Moon River’ and that’s good enough? Likewise, with a writer such as Dyer (and there aren’t too many in his league), what you dig is interpretation, in its several senses: exegesis, and profound internalization of a subject, and a thorough imaginative remaking of that subject…”
Shepard Fairey: ‘May Day’
“The further he is from traditional art objects and settings, the better. On the walls of an art gallery, his efforts look like death warmed over….Otherwise, the ham-handed image-mongering, rudimentary associations and nasty yellow build-up are themselves distressing. Despite Mr. Fairey’s apparent good intentions about social action and individual creativity, this exhibition reveals the point at which lack of originality curdles into visual cynicism. It is not a pretty sight.”
