In February, a group of students and I visited the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Originally built to be used as a medium-security prison, it went unoccupied for years….
Archive for 2020
Extraordinary Renditions
In August 2003, as the United States was ramping up the Global War on Terror, the Pentagon hosted a curious movie night for its intelligence and army personnel: Gillo Pontecorvo’s…
Enrique Olvera and the Sociopolitical Aesthetics of Neoliberal Culinary Art
Chef’s Table, streaming on Netflix for six seasons so far, aspires to elevate the chef as an artist and bring the rarefied sphere of gourmets and foodies to a wider…
Neoliberal Gaslighting, Quality Journalism, and Podcasting
The American Dream In the spring of 2018, ABC aired the family-oriented sitcom Alex, Inc, the story of a man who risks his family’s savings on starting a venture-funded podcasting…
Playing Through a Serious Crisis: On the Neoliberal Art of Video Games
In Reality is Broken (2011), Jane McGonigal recounts a story about games that appears in the opening book of Herodotus’s ancient Greek text Histories: When Atys was king of Lydia…
Human Capital After All: Business Techno, Conceptronica, and the Neoliberal Rescripting of High/Low Hierarchies
As disco, house, and techno emerged from queer communities of color in deindustrializing New York, Chicago, and Detroit, these genres of electronic dance music occupied an aesthetic status that paralleled…
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: An Ode to the Audiobook
What we experience as audiobooks today originated in the UK in the 1920s as the talking book. Back then the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) tested different ways…
The Cartoonist as Entrepreneur: Rob Liefeld, Image Comics, and the Art of the Creator-Owner
Spike Lee: Rob, have you had any formal art training? Rob Liefeld: No, just a lot of imagination. — Levi’s 501 Button Fly Commercial (1991) I. In the second episode…
Quality Is Just Another Word
One spring afternoon while in quarantine, I ended up watching NBC’s Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87) on Hulu. I watched because of the mythical status of Hill Street Blues in…
The 7 Neoliberal Arts, or: Art in the Age of Mass High Culture
The neoliberal period has seen myriad new and formerly marginalized cultural forms aspire to the status of art. Over the last half century, quality television, graphic novels, avant-garde video games,…