Google’s not screwing around, when they’re mapping, they’re mapping.
— Lucia
We happen to be in one of the ones we can be in.
— Michael Gordin
Lady, running down to the riptide.
— Vance Joy, “Riptide”
What I’m grandly and abstractly calling “works of art” are more concretely and prosaically books, songs, movies, plays, television series, environmental installations, paintings, operas and anything else that falls into the bin of consumer goods marked “Culture.” These goods are bought and sold, whether as physical objects, ephemeral real-time experiences or digital artifacts. Their making requires labor, capital and a market for distribution. The money might come from foundations, Kickstarter campaigns or retail sales or advertising revenue. The commerce between artist and public is brokered by the traditional culture industry (publishing houses, television networks, record labels and movie studios) and also by disruptive upstarts like Amazon, Netflix, Google and iTunes. But the whole system, from top to bottom, from the Metropolitan Opera House to the busker in the subway station below it, is inescapably part of the capitalist economy.
— A. O. Scott, “Is Our Art Equal to the Challenges of Our Times?,” The New York Times
Hanging out with highschool friends at Midwestern prices: priceless.
— TKP
It’s a lie. Everybody’s dependent on somebody. Nobody gave birth to themselves. Everybody gets a language from somewhere else. And so the notion of self-made men, from Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln-even Frederick Douglass went around the country giving lectures on being self-made. It’s an American lie that anybody’s self-made.
— Cornel West, TIME
Commercial use of drones is also largely prohibited in the United States, largely because of the perceived risks of unleashing swarms of them into the skies.
— Nick Wingfield, “Now, Anyone Can Buy a Drone. Heaven Help Us.,” The New York Times
You only need to theorize the thing that you’re talking about.
— Lucia
When Noel Coward, whom Paepcke had met casually in the twenties, jocularly inquired of him in the year CCA’s corporate image took form, “What is a container and what does it contain?” Paepcke might have replied, “It is a box designed to be seen. It might contain nothing at all.”
— James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture
Here is the irony of the twentieth-century relationship between commerce and culture. By so successfully allying their cultural aspirations with commercial techniques, artists and intellectuals helped unify modern culture, but at the risk of turning art and ideas into commodities, things so readily and casually consumed that they must lose much of their power to criticize life and to change it.
— James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture
Pushup!
You go Glenn Coco!
— Damian, Mean Girls
Hasn’t stopped you looking.
— Cutter, The Prestige
4.1 Objects absorb only. They never tell (at least intentionally). They are the most faultless of all things.
— Caresse, “The Voyeurism of Objects”
Nothing happened, it’s just architects talking.
— Lucia
A mix of compassion and preemptive stabilization.
— Justin
And although he frequently referred to himself publicly, with the self-depreciation typical of the capitalist among artists and intellectuals, as “only a prosaic box maker,” he rose by means of the Container Corporation to prominence as an exponent of modern design and of cultural reform in the mid-twentieth-century America.
— James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture
Can you fit 7?
— Dad to an Uber as a joke that was then taken seriously
The collapse of the architectural object into a field of modulated patterns visible at every scale.
— Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space
Otto, why didn’t you run?
— Doc Watson, “Otto Wood the Bandit”