In Slate today, a piece by me on  "recreativity" -  a critique of the emerging orthodoxy of "everything is a remix" / "originality is a myth" / "no such thing as genius", in terms of its relationship to digital culture and to dance music ideas that are frankly a bit stale at this point. 

(Reading some of the arguments being made these past few years from critics, academics, artists, etc you can't help wondering if these dudes heard a Girl Talk CD and had their minds blown.)

Or, old fashioned modernism versus what is now equally old fashioned postmodernism.

"Just what is it that makes today's cities so disjointed, so anomic?" 

-- Our God Is Speed aka Greyhoos raises a smile with the title to this picture-post of the architectural collages of Nils-Ole Lund

 

a sort of mute addendum to his "scattered and increasingly digressive" series of posts on collage in the visual arts

 

more Lund here 

 

 c.f. all the talk about vaporwave and the children of Ferraro & Lopatin, or indeed the endless commentary about Marclay's The Clock, the question is: will we ever get past Pop Art?

 

"Endless" indeed: that's three verdicts offered from a single magazine in a five month stretch this year!

 

Of the three, the Richard Brody take struck the loudest chord with me. After Clock-watching earlier this year when it came to LA, I concluded that  it was postmodernism's Sistine Chapel - an achievement of grand scale, at once about and in collusion with faithlessness and the desacralisation of art...  a testament to an ever-deteriorating inability to get lost in the work of art (the film, the long-playing record, or indeed the rave - having gone to one at the weekend and been startled by how many people were texting or phone-videoing or otherwise social-mediatising the experience they were only partial-immersed in)

 

in that sense, truly epochal, deserving of all the column inches

 

but, as Brody says, a love-less masterpiece...  a delightful disenchantment

 

a mash-up... the art world equivalent of "Intro Inspection" (and look how someone's labored to depict the appropriate record-covers for every appropriated intro)

 

enabled by, expressive of, the same digital facility 

 

the technology itself eloquently speaking its dark will to dis-integrate