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The Nineties Are History, and Other News

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On the Shelf

AZIZ-and-CUCHER-_Man-with-a-Computer-1992

Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cutcher, Man with a Computer (detail), 1992. Image via Hyperallergic

  • Today is the first-ever Dylan Day: a commemoration of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which he debuted at 92Y (his voice “removed and godlike in tone”) on May 14, 1953. Dylan Day grants you a plausible reason to seize strangers by their lapels and scream about raging against the dying of the light. Do this. The opportunity comes but once a year.
  • What happens when a performance artist abducts a bunch of curators and collectors for an “experimental expedition” in the Swiss Alps? More or less what you’d expect: “Kobilinsky appeared out in the snow. He was completely naked and he was walking toward the structure. It was a wild sight. Not just the naked man staggering through a wide expanse of snowy nothingness, but the group of esteemed collectors crowding the windows like eager schoolchildren. When Kobilinsky reached the crystal igloo and began to crawl inside, agonizing screams started emanating from somewhere outside the train.”
  • “I would sacrifice my own life for a chance to throw a single brick at Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist who eats too much … He coughs up feathers out of his mouth wherever he goes.” New “letters” between “Hemingway” and “Fitzgerald.”
  • As the nineties cedes its contemporariness and becomes “an object of historical inquiry,” it is now time to ask: What the hell happened back there? A new show, “Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s,” begins the critical task of contextualizing the works of the Clinton era. “The show marks our own radical break with a decade at once familiar and unfamiliar … The nineties were marked by various points of turbulence that have now evolved into unremarkable if not unproblematic features of our daily lives: a changing geopolitical order, precipitated by the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union; the “digital revolution,” which linked spatially disparate societies for the first time; the emergence of a global art scene and the series of international festivals and events it spawned; and the advent of so-called ‘identity politics.’ ”
  • Before there was Naples, there was Parthenope, a beautiful city on the bay in roughly the same location; Virgil retired there, and the city traded on this fact for centuries. “Virgil’s place in Parthenope was paraded from the moment of his death, though not perhaps in the way he might most have wished. He became much more than a poet. The author of the Aeneid was variously the city’s owner, its founder, a wizard, a magician tunnel-maker, a worker of miracles and, when Christianity sensed a rival, a worker of Christian miracles.”