Winter Reading Program -- January 15, 2023

I finally completed: 

• Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World, Tobia Hürter, c. 2021.
  

The books I will be reading over the next couple of weeks. Probably longer. 

Notes on the Mailer book at this post. I've already read the first two chapters and am hooked. I can see why it was a bestseller .

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Fine Arts

From The WSJ today: link here.

From the linked article:

In 1987, artist Gretchen Bender created the installation “Total Recall,” a wall of televisions and projection screens emitting a barrage of nonstop flashing images and sound. As a critique of digital culture, it was strikingly prescient. The shift to screen life has been decades in the making, and generations of tech-savvy artists have been charting those changes. The new exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen,” opening February 12, 2023, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth , features more than 70 works by 50 artists, for whom the screen is both indispensable tool and irresistible subject.

These works include paintings, sculpture, videogames, augmented reality projects and more the 1960s to the present. The show is structured around themes such as connectivity, surveillance and the posthuman body, in which art and screen “intersect most dynamically,” says the show’s organizer, MAM curator Alison Hearst.

The first section presents screen-art pioneers like Nam June Paik, whose “TV Buddha” inspired the exhibition. In that piece, an 18th-century sculpture of the Buddha seems to gaze at its own image played back on closed-circuit TV. Originally created in the early 1970s, Paik’s iconic work foreshadows the “closed-loop echo chamber that screens create” online, Ms. Hearst says, as well as the “vanity of contemporary social media.”

Andy Warhol tried his hand at screen art in 1985, when he was hired to promote a new graphic software and created digital drawings on the Amiga, a short-lived computer beloved by programmers. At the museum, the Amiga displaying these works is a vintage 1985 model. Using an old-style corded mouse, visitors can click through a dozen Warhol pieces, including a pattern-crazed, psychedelic self-portrait. “I can’t wait for younger generations to interact with this technology,” Ms. Hearst says, imagining “how slow and awkward it must feel” to Gen Z audiences.

Much more at the link.