Years ago, I worked at a national historic site on Boston’s Freedom Trail. A frequent question of visitors was “How much of the building is original?” I knew what they meant by the question but sometimes I felt waggish (or was a smarmy asshole, depending upon your point of view) and would answer that it [...]
The Chronographical Survey #3: Four Minutes to Midnight, Issue 10
Projects like the visual/literary journal Four Minutes to Midnight (23:56 from now on) evoke Steve Baker’s “A Poetics of Graphic Design?” The 1994 article—which appeared in the Andrew Blauvelt-edited New Perspectives: Critical Histories of Graphic Design—is one of the most intriguing essays written about graphic design criticism. It proposed a unique method of representing design [...]
The Chronographical Survey #2: The Atlantic
My longest-running magazine subscription is for the Atlantic (Monthly), going back some 20+ years. I can’t recall exactly where I first encountered it, likely someone I was staying with or visiting frequently had a subscription. Though I was just out of art school, I ponied up for my own subscription when my borrowed access ended. [...]
Do Not Read Me I Am Boring
On Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far
The arguments these artists mount to the detraction of beauty come down to a single gripe: Beauty sells, and although their complaints usually are couched in the language of academic radicalism, they do not differ greatly from my grandmother’s haut bourgeois prejudices against people [...]
