In Detroit, meanwhile, a new exhibition called “99 Cents or Less” looks at the role of the dollar store in contemporary America.
In Detroit, meanwhile, a new exhibition called “99 Cents or Less” looks at the role of the dollar store in contemporary America. Chris Hampton writes, “The museum’s senior curator at large, Jens Hoffmann, invited participants to consider the dollar store—and its proliferation since the Great Recession—as an emblem of widening economic inequality, globalization, complex supply chains and rampant consumerism … Detroit has an especially high concentration of dollar stores, Mr. Hoffmann pointed out. Products that might once have been made there are now born in South, Southeast and East Asian factories—delivered and sold for less than a buck … Acknowledging ‘it’s where most of America shops,’ the Los Angeles–based artist Sean Raspet sampled surface cleaners available in Detroit dollar stores and mixed them together, turning the resulting solution over to the maintenance staff to use on their regular rounds, emphasizing the sort of labor and goods that are often made invisible … Agnieszka Kurant offered a darker take, likening dollar-store goods to palliatives, painkillers and placebos. She bought items like self-help books, hula hoops, cooking utensils, ramen noodles and had the lot industrially pulverized, then pressed by a compacting company into pills.”
Our managing editor, Nicole Rudick, takes a second look at The Parable of the Blind, a 1985 novel by Gert Hofmann: “It is told solely through dialogue and sets the reader adrift amid unreliable accounts. Reissued this month, with a new afterword by the author’s son, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann, Parable offers sly, strikingly contemporary commentary on the precariousness of language and facts, and, in particular, on the need to negotiate unstable ground—literally, but also socially and politically—afresh each day. The Parable of the Blind gives narrative form to Pieter Bruegel’s eponymous 1568 painting, in which six blind men have begun to tumble, like dominoes, into a ditch, illustrating the old maxim concerning the dangers of the blind leading the blind … The world beyond their sightless eyes seems prankish and spurious by turns—there to trick them, or not really there at all. ‘Every move is an ontological pratfall, a philosophical banana peel,’ Michael Hofmann writes in his afterword. The slipperiness of vision, sight, and appearance is a readymade joke for both the blind and the sighted.”
Andrew Crofts on those unsung heroes, ghostwriters: “The hiring of a ghostwriter is a mutually seductive process. Those who are ghosted know that their reputations are going to be channeled through our eyes, and they are eager to make the right impression while at the same time maintaining the upper hand. They tend to like to meet in their palatial homes or in hotels that they think will reflect well on them … You can expect that they will entertain you royally while they are telling you their secrets, but once the job is over, so is your relationship … You want to encourage them to open up and tell you more, not clam up and become defensive. You are producing the book that they would write if they could, so any views expressed in it are theirs and not yours. You are writing in their voices, taking on their characters, pleading their case for them more eloquently than they are able to do for themselves.”
“Environmental Exposure,” an exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, looks back to the landscape photography of the seventies, when a raft Tate commandments of environmental concerns began to shape the medium. Matthew Harrison Tedford writes that a “desire to avoid romanticizing the landscape is fundamental to the shifts in landscape photography that occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s. Frank Gohlke’s Landscape, Albuquerque (1974) takes this iconoclasm to its natural conclusion. Confidently asserting with its title that we are looking at a landscape, the image offers nothing natural except for the cloudy New Mexico sky and a fraction of a hill in the distance. A smooth concrete embankment occupies a third of the image, and the horizon line is populated with cars and billboards. Even the mud at the bottom of the embankment is branded by tire tracks.”
If I think about the Ten Commandments, what instantly comes to mind are stone tablets, Charlton Heston and the deep, authoritative, all-powerful, voice of God.
So when I say the ten commandments are actually a “love letter written in stone” it might make one pause.
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