Hedi El Kholti’s book of collages, A Place in the Sun (Hesse Press: Los Angeles, CA, 2017), collects images of subversive beauty, drawn largely from magazines, and transforms them as they play off each other, creating resonances over a wide … Continue reading “An Unbounded Universe of Adventure and Risk: Notes on Hedi El Kholti’s A Place in the Sun“
What does the prominence of cuteness as an aesthetic category amid US-Chinese codependency and rivalry tell us about the global population’s attachments and desires? Under what circumstances do cute objects become facilitators of the cruel optimism that structures the relation … Continue reading “Cuteness: The Aesthetic Category of a Dystopic Global Asia”
Reviewed: Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). I began reading these two … Continue reading “Listening at the End of the Twentieth Century”
