The shifting, the transformation, of the relationship between individual artistic components became the central issue in Formalist investigations. […] It…
Using Viktor Shklovsky
[This post began as a response to some comments made by Douglas Storm on Amber’s most recent post.] The name…
David Foster Wallace, on Television, on Television as the Dominant
I’m very fond of quoting from Roman Jakobson’s 1935 essay “The Dominant”. Lately I’ve been thinking about this passage in…
The 1970s vs. the 2000s (in Hollywood film, at least)
Paul’s post “Science in the Ghetto” got me thinking about the infantilizing of Hollywood movies. I wanted to see if…
Alternative Values in Small-Press Culture
This follows J. A.’s post here, which sprang out of conversation here; it’s also motivated by Greg’s recent post about…
Art as Experience
In the comments section of my last post, Can Video Games Be Art?, I sketched out a definition of art…
What Is Experimental Art?
One typically hears unusual art called three different things, often interchangeably: Innovative Avant-Garde Experimental But what do these three words…
The Dominant and the Longue Durée
It’s a very familiar story: Romanticism began in 1798 and ended in 1900, when it was replaced by Modernism. …Although…