The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever since Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York destroyed itself at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or remote. Where the sculpture did have some material presence, it often took unexpected forms. As Rosalind Krauss says, “Rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow (...) corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.”However various these experiments may seem, they began with a single motive: to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself. To prevent this new work from becoming just another commodity in the market, artists either produced works so intangible or remote they could not be bought and sold, or disseminated their ideas in so many reproducible forms they could not be monopolized. The political nature of these motives also meant that much of this “sculpture” could be considered “public.” Changing the nature of the art meant changing the role of the audience as well, questioning the purely contemplative role the observer plays in the conventional setting of the museum or gallery. According to Henry Sayre, “As the avant-garde work of art denies its own autonomy, it implicates the audience in its workings.”3 As the aesthetic focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the relationship of the two goes beyond mere implication: the public becomes the sculpture. Artists, like Richard Serra, whose goal is to illuminate the material nature of space and the often tenuous materiality of the observer’s own body, have made “the viewer, in effect, the subject of the work,” to quote Douglas Crimp. Michael North is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets and is currently completing a study of the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. (shrink)

If art and science have one thing in common, it’s a hunger for the new—new ideas and innovations, new ways of seeing and depicting the world. But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental philosophical problem: If everything has to come from _something_, how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible? In _Novelty_, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tour of more than two millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the puzzles (...) of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the 1960s and ’70s. The terms of the debate, North shows, were established before Plato, and have changed very little since: novelty, philosophers argued, could only arise from either recurrence or recombination. The former, found in nature’s cycles of renewal, and the latter, seen most clearly in the workings of language, between them have accounted for nearly all the ways in which novelty has been conceived in Western history, taking in reformation, renaissance, invention, revolution, and even evolution. As he pursues this idea through centuries and across disciplines, North exhibits astonishing range, drawing on figures as diverse as Charles Darwin and Robert Smithson, Thomas Kuhn and Ezra Pound, Norbert Wiener and Andy Warhol, all of whom offer different ways of grappling with the idea of originality. Novelty, North demonstrates, remains a central problem of contemporary science and literature—an ever-receding target that, in its complexity and evasiveness, continues to inspire and propel the modern. A heady, ambitious intellectual feast, _Novelty_ is rich with insight, a masterpiece of perceptive synthesis. (shrink)

Ageism is a pan-cultural problem, and correspondingly, increased research attention worldwide has focused on how a person’s age drives prejudice against them. Nevertheless, recent work argues that chronological age alone is a limited predictor of prejudice—particularly in the workplace, where age conflates intertwined elements, and across cultures, in which the nature of ageism can substantially differ. A recent organizational behavior framework advocates for extending beyond numerical age alone, focusing instead on prejudice arising from workers’ perceived Generation, Age, Tenure, and Experience. (...) In addition to clarifying the multifaceted nature of workplace ageism, GATE helps uncover potential cultural ageism differences. Using the United States and China as focal Western and Eastern prototypes, the current paper compares Eastern and Western cultures through a GATE Lens. Eastern and Western cultures adopt different perceptions of generations, elder life stages, organizational tenure expectations, and desired experience levels. Moreover, existing research offers clues for how workplace GATE-ism likely differs between cultures, but more research is needed. Future research should adopt a nuanced GATE conception of “age”-ism, toward enhanced ageism understanding and the ability to utilize a globally aging workforce. (shrink)

The present study investigates whether people can infer the preferences of others from spontaneous facial expressions alone. We utilize a paradigm that unobtrusively records people's natural facial reactions to relatively mundane stimuli while they simultaneously report which ones they find more appealing. Videos were then presented to perceivers who attempted to infer the choices of the target individuals—thereby linking perceiver inferences to objective outcomes. Perceivers demonstrated above-chance ability to infer target preferences across four different stimulus categories: people (attractiveness), cartoons (humor), (...) paintings (decorative appeal), and animals (cuteness). While perceivers' subjective ratings of expressivity varied somewhat between targets, these ratings did not predict the relative “readability” of the targets. The findings suggest that noncommunicative, natural facial behavior by itself suffices for certain types interpersonal prediction, even in low-emotional contexts. (shrink)