Presidential Name Civilizer

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Perhaps you find it mildly cringe-​​inducing every time you see an Internet commentator has referred to the president as “the President, who I admire,” in some kind of combined infantilization/​nutty insinuation that the coincidence of his middle name betrays DEEP SIGNIFICANCE. And perhaps as well these mild cringes build up over time into a vague disgust, and you wish you could stuff a proverbial sock in the proverbial mouth of everyone who persists with this un-​​amusing joke, just… Read more »

Tying off threads

We are engaging in a week-​​long media diet. Or “media fast” is maybe more accurate. An information diet. It is exactly as hard as I imagined not to fill every dead minute with goalless web surfing.

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The rise of “image sharing” (is this what they are called?) and group-​​surf blogs in the past three years seems to have exponentially increased the already sickening pace of image proliferation. Things Magazine references this quite often. Images have never been so disposable, so fleeting, and so easily forgotten.… Read more »

Lexicon: Dude Art

Dude Art has become so mainstream since I first started carelessly throwing around the term that the definition is almost too fuzzy to be useful anymore. Originally intended to refer to the type of art that one finds on skateboard decks–but not the type of skateboard decks that you use, the type that you hang on your wall (“you” here referring to everyone but “me”), dude art exists at the highly profitable intersection of graffiti, skate culture, independent comics (post–Fort Thunder), “design” (advertising), collage and video… Read more »

Lexicon: Art Trolls

Though actually predating its namesake by a generation or more, the Art Troll gets its current name from the Internet Troll, a special class of Internet users who post “controversial and usually irrelevant or off-​​topic messages…with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-​​topic discussion.”#

Certainly art has been shocking and occasionally scandalous for most of its history, but I say the Internet Troll only predates its namesake by about a generation because the Art Troll requires… Read more »