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40% complete! rra has read 6 of 15 books.
How do we write about the singular experience of parenthood? Written in a ‘state of attachment’, or ‘under the influence’ …
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, …
Their English wasn't perfect but they could do more than get by. English was the glue that held their community together, with variants and mistakes tolerated so that everyone felt free to speak. Until such time as someone claimed English as theirs —and there were still too few Londoners and New Yorkers for that— it belonged to everyone. [...] When they hung out in groups they would switch seamlessly between their own language and a heavily accented English punctuated with German terms pronounced in a faintly Californian drawl. Language wasn't the only national trait to dissolve. They had stopped reading newspapers from home soon after moving, the moment they realized how sloppy the journalism was compared to the writing in their English-language equivalents. Their intellectual horizon was therefore largely formed from headlines in the Guardian or the New York Times, which happened to be the same newspapers their Greek, Dutch and Belgian friends read. In their world, Barack Obama's speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours' flight south.
— Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (Page 62)
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life …
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life …
Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the …
How the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed, rejuvenated, and protected American forests and parks at the height of the Great Depression. …
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the …
Because works of art are reproducible, they can, theoretically, be used by anybody. Yet mostly -in art books, magazines, films or within gilt frames in living-rooms- reproductions are still used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling.
— Ways of Seeing by John Berger, et al (Page 29)
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the …
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured by its materiality. The soul, thanks to the Cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. A painting could speak to the soul - by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it envisaged. Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority.
— Ways of Seeing by John Berger, et al (Page 87)
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the …
A central art-school reference that I actually never read during art school. Too busy making stuff, I guess.
Finally reading it more than a decade after I got it assigned, I find it striking how the ideas it has about images are so normalized that they do not even seem remarkable but rather cliché. It goes to show how early 2010s West-European art institutions live and breathe Berger et al.'s (as well as Beaudrillard, Mulvey, de Beauvoir's) perspectives on classic painting and visual culture.
The visual essays are particularly interesting, but the penguin pocket version butchers their lay-out.
Thanks to @vanderZwan@vis.social for borrowing it to me!
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose …
The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and …
