Geoff Edgers makes it to Salem to see the Cornell show and says, "Believe the hype." I do, and have tentative plans to go see it this weekend. If I don't make it, I'll have to make do with the interactive feature the museum put up and the catalog, because this is pretty much my last chance. Geoff also has the attendance numbers on the Cornell and Hopper at the MFA--it's what you'd probably expect, but good to see nonetheless, and not bad at all in either instance.
Hm, on a related note, I was googling around on Cornell's name and came across this article, which contains as fey a little bit of faux Foucault as you'll ever see:
Even with the diaries to assist us, we shouldn't think we understand Cornell. To understand is to pathologize. Let's not place a value, a prescriptive term on him--because it will necessarily be the brand of the nostalgic eccentric. Let's consider him, instead, a harbinger, a wily assembler whose radicalism we haven't caught up with yet, even if he now seems domesticated, a mini-titan of a bygone moment.
Leave aside the fact that the author immediately turns to placing values and prescriptive terms on Cornell after telling us not to do so. "To understand is to pathologize"? That is as silly a piece of pseudo-profundity as I've seen put forward in some time, one that in its manifest lack of seriousness calls to mind Lionel Trilling's remark that "it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence." No surprise that the article first appeared in Artforum.
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