The Work of Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Art

“Not that I have to be at this range, but I'm a fucking surgeon with this shotgun.”
Karen Kim, Not, As it Turns Out, the Hotel Hospitality Manager. Kill Bill, Vol. 2



The producer of culture and cultural products is beset on all sides by the inequities of the kitsch and the tyranny of the avant-garde. Three score and nine years ago Greenbergian cultural cladistics created very little overlapping property in the kitsch nee avant-garde ven diagram. The ven diagram aside, the zen of the diagram is now no less than apotheosis of critical architecture.

Particular among agents of the cultural evolution architects engaged in the production of the architectural artifact command aggregates of wealth compatible to the control of summer interns working the credit default swap desk at AIG. Maybe not that much, but still, a lot of money. Trusteeship of such vast princely capitol reserves requires the work of mechanical reproduction tattoo a narration of it's own chronistic appropriateness in the thinnest supportable veneer. Don we now our Whiting and Somol, and call upon Perspecta 33, the corrective to the corrective. Their minifestette was the undoing of a generation of mandatory criticality and the codification of a positive project for zeitgeistians who cherish criticality.

There may easily be a condition of the spirit we could agree to call post-hegelian. Post-hegelians will automatically find contraction in the notion of the critical zeitgeist. To counter post-hegelian premature de-narration the narrow band of the popular and the critical is the cool. The critical zeitgeist is a cucumber indifferent to popular demand and with a unending desire to be diagrammed in felt pen and prose.

Damit!!! Now I'm tired and ready for bed before I finish again. Let's end with this: The critical architect wields a scalpel with the weight of a freight train. He is a surgeon with a shot gun