I was getting drunk with a painter recently and, when the topic of this site came up, they asked me: how do you do this to yourself week after week? What is wrong with you? Most of the work in this city is barely even mediocre at best. How can you justify writing about it? Cruel questions? Perhaps. It is difficult to justify writing about a lot of it. A great deal of it, maybe even all of it, is mediocre. This is not a matter of taste. Most of it is ontologically mediocre. As a historian, mediocrity is something that I take an interest in. Human history, like most history, is merely a minor chapter in the long evolution of death. This chapter could be written as comedy, tragedy, or some hybrid. In the end, it likely is not a narrative at all, just a digression. Human beings are not even protagonists in this. The most generous thing you can say about them is that they are tools. Most historians are bad historians because they do not have much of a sense of humour and because they...
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.