January 23, 2018 Redux Redux: Dorothy Parker, Alexia Arthurs, Elena Wilkinson By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Dorothy Parker’s Art of Fiction interview from our Summer 1956 issue, Alexia Arthurs’s short story “Bad Behavior,” and Elena Wilkinson’s poem “After the Loss of a Limb.” If you like what you read, you can also listen to all three in the eighth episode of our podcast, “Questionable Behavior”; and if you like what you hear, why not give us a boost in the charts by subscribing on iTunes. While you’re there, tell us in the comments how much you love the show. Read More
January 23, 2018 Arts & Culture How Much for That Pepe? Scenes from the First Rare Digital Art Auction By Daniel Penny Blockchain technology could reshape the digital-art market for years to come. Digital art collection by artists from dada.nyc The first Rare Digital Art Festival, aka Rare AF, aka Rare as Fuck, was held on a cold January Saturday in the offices of Rise New York. The organizers, Kevin Trinh and Tommy Nicholas of the Rare Art Registry Exchange, had announced the event only a few weeks earlier, but by midmorning, the airy coworking space was swarming with crypto boosters and speculators, gamers, meme aficionados, artists, and collectors. This unlikely crowd (mostly young men, though I heard one audience member marvel at “all the women” present) had gathered for panel discussions, demos, an initial-coin-offering announcement, free sandwiches, and a live digital-art auction. Like many tech events, the aim of the conference was ambitious bordering on grandiose: the attendees of Rare AF believed they were witnessing history. They were certain that blockchain technology would reshape the future of digital art for years to come. All the panels shared an underlying premise: The rise of digital media has made every kind of art widely accessible, but it has also created many problems. Because people can copy and share files freely and infinitely, artists don’t receive compensation for their work. Worse, an increasingly powerful cadre of middlemen services (Amazon, Spotify, etc.) have been fracturing the media landscape while reaping almost all of the profits. Enter the blockchain, a decentralized and immutable ledger of digital transactions with the power to reintroduce scarcity and property rights to the digital-media economy. Many conference participants held strong beliefs about the superiority of a particular blockchain (Bitcoin vs. Ethereum), but for artists and collectors, the processes and results of these competing cryptocurrencies are fairly similar. An artist creates a limited-edition crypto collectible—the digital equivalent of a signed print—and exchanges it with a buyer for some cryptocurrency. The new buyer truly owns this digital object; they can keep it in their crypto wallet, show it off in a virtual gallery, or project it from a digital picture frame hung on their wall—a service offered by panelist Vladimir Vukicevic’s company Meural. Just as you can share reproductions of the Mona Lisa, someone could still copy and paste the image, but the provenance and price history of the original are accessible to all. The original of these works is identifiable and cannot be replicated, which is why they are called “provably rare.” Kieran Farr, a panelist representing a virtual-reality platform called Decentraland, summed things up to a round of applause: “Finally, authenticity has value.” Read More
January 23, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Houses By Amit Chaudhuri This is the first installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s new column, The Moment. When do we start noticing a house? We know it’s there, but don’t look at it. We might die without actually having seen it. I ask this because of my interest in Calcutta’s residential houses. Calcutta is where I was born, but I grew up in Bombay. I rehearse this sentence yet again for strangers to explain my discombobulated sensibility. I used to visit my uncle’s three-story house in Calcutta over my summer holidays as a child, and think of it as home—because my aunt and uncle and three cousins exuded a Bengali dysfunctionality that I associated with that word. But, in comparison to the twelfth-story flat where I grew up in Bombay, in Malabar Hill, and from where, when I was ten years old, I had an uninterrupted view of the sea, the house in Calcutta absorbed me. At some point, I must have gained clarity about two things: first, that the low houses of South Calcutta, and the opportunities they offered me to study the street outside and the houses opposite—to eavesdrop and spy—were preferable, to me, to the panoramic and godlike perspective that the twelfth-story flat provided. Second, I understood retrospectively that these Calcutta houses meant something not solely because of my personal memory but because they comprised areas that bore the imprint of a modernity that was to be found in some other cities, too—in Istanbul, Montevideo, Berlin, New York—though not, when I was growing up there, in the bit of Bombay in which I lived. These areas involved an encounter with the “historical.” Read More
January 22, 2018 Arts & Culture The Poet Upstairs By Aysegul Savas Avigdor Arikha, “Anne in Summer,” 1980 We call her Upstairs; she calls us Downstairs. From our ground-floor apartment in Paris, my husband and I can look across the courtyard to her apartment on the top floor, with its large, curved windows. “Downstairs,” she writes, “before drawing the curtain for the night, stepped out on the balcony, and saw your light on; which was good news.” Each message from her is a treasure: “When next we meet, we’ll salute each other like two lamp-posts, lighting up at the same time. Have a lovely day without rain.” She tells us often that we live in a village. She says that’s a lucky thing. She has a way of molding the mundane into harmony, of living in music. “Look at me walk,” she says, and sets off singing to the rhythm of her walking stick. “Un, deux, trois. Un, deux, trois.” She rhymes when she jokes, recites poems out of the blue, as if she had the lines flowing through her without cease. One morning, when we run into her at the Saturday market, she tells us she’s been reading the phone book and that it made her cry. “All those names,” she says. This is our neighbor, the poet Anne Atik. Read More
January 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance By Mark Whitaker Duke Ellington with a group posed in Loendi Club for Synchronettes Club party, by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1938. Copyright: © 2006 Carnegie Museum of Art. Toward the northern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, at the point where the East Coast ends and the great American Midwest begins, three rivers meet. The Allegheny flows from the north, gathering the tributaries of western New York State. The Monongahela cascades from the south, through the hills and hollers of West Virginia. Together, they form the headwaters of the Ohio, which meanders west all the way to Illinois, where it connects to the mighty Mississippi and its tentacles reach from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of its strategic value, the intersection of these three rivers had generals named Braddock and Forbes and Washington fighting to control the surrounding patch of western Pennsylvania two decades before the War for Independence. Because it allowed steamboats to reach the coal deposits in the nearby hills, the watery nexus made the city that grew up around it the nation’s largest producer of steel and created the vast wealth of businessmen and financiers named Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, and Mellon, whose legacies live on in the renowned libraries, foundations, and art collections funded by their fortunes. Read More
January 22, 2018 Arts & Culture A Queer Reading of Go Ask Alice By James Frankie Thomas Reading Go Ask Alice—the so-called real diary, first published in 1971, of an anonymous girl who took drugs and died—is an experience so widely shared that there’s little point personalizing it. Everyone who encounters Go Ask Alice goes through the same four stages: Titillated horror, for the young reader, at the book’s dramatic depictions of drug use. Creeping suspicion, as the reader ages past adolescence, that there’s something fishy about the diarist’s life-destroying addiction to LSD and marijuana, not to mention the very premise that a diary kept by a homeless drug addict and “recorded on single sheets of paper, paper bags, etc.” was perfectly preserved for posthumous publication. Revelation, for the adult reader, that Go Ask Alice is not, in fact, a “real diary” but a fictional hoax written by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks whose other books included Jay’s Journal (the “real diary” of an anonymous boy who got involved in Satanism and died) and It Happened to Nancy (the “real diary” of an anonymous girl who got date-raped, caught AIDS, and died). Howling hilarity upon rereading the book in this context. By now, the Go Ask Alice reader’s narrative is a comic genre unto itself. (For the best examples, see Paul F. Tompkins and Mallory Ortberg.) I will now add my own to the pile, if only to establish my credentials as the world’s foremost authority on Go Ask Alice. Read More