One-Way Street

Cervantes's Laugh

We live in Cervantes's world, says Julia Kristeva, a world of fanatics "drunk on images" of the virtual Absolute. It would seem that the only way to live in this world is to laugh at faith and love, as Cervantes does.

[D]are I suggest those dangerous maniacs of the virtual Absolute might not really be so scary? Cervantes’s laughter will get the better of them. Their fundamentalist rage would be defused if they just read him instead of burning flags, embassies, and Danish cartoons. And he could detoxify the rest. I know, there’s a long way to go — fanatics are no good at reading, or laughing.

From Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, via spoliamag.tumblr.com

Kristeva, however, looks to the 16th-century Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Avila (and the subject of a notorious Bernini sculpture, above) as a cure to the nihilism inside all those who suffer from the disease of frustrated idealism.  Teresa, Kristeva writes, is important because she heals the split between belief and love and "ventures as far as possible along the route that beckons the person who doesn’t give up on believing, the person who talks as a way of sharing, and who loves in order to act" and describes the journey with "disturbing, seductive subtlety."

The Symbol Machine: David Bowie Is

Last Friday night I visited the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. The first question to answer is whether or not David Bowie is worthy of an exhibit at a major art museum. The answer is yes. Bowie gets the full artist treatment in David Bowie Is: paintings, costumes, manuscripts, posters, album covers, video installations—even a coke spoon. The exhibit makes a convincing case that David Bowie is an artist.

Bowie’s life has three stages: the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. His roots were in drizzly post-war England, a landscape of darkened streets and derivative pop culture that would drive any sensitive and intelligent person a little batty. This was the reality from which he struggled to escape. Even his real name, Davy Jones, held him back. His breakout hit was “Space Oddity,” released in the same week as the Apollo 11 moon walk. The song was built on folk strumming and abruptly shifting points of view; the disintegration of self was already underway. In subsequent albums he appropriated a dazzling variety of symbols, many of them derived from literature, to build personas that unified his recorded music and his stage shows, while distinguishing himself in a market full of high-concept rock acts. J.G. Ballard inspired the decadent visions of doom that shaped his early persona Ziggy Stardust. He borrowed William Burroughs’ cut-up technique to compose lyrics. Later in his career he incorporated ideas from Japanese fashion designers and German cabaret theater—exotic stuff if you expect your rock star to venture no further than some close listenings to Howlin’ Wolf.

During his symbolic phase he used his mannikin-like body as his primary means of expression. It’s appropriate that the MCA exhibit centers around the costumes he wore on stage. Through the galleries mannikins in Bowie wear stand over the the jumble of bric-a-brac—keys to his Berlin apartment and so on—that makes up a rock musician’s life. The costumes are beautiful, looking more like sketches for clothes rather than something someone would wear. Cleaned up for the exhibit, the outfits show no signs of wear and tear, rather like Bowie himself. There were times, however, when the costumes overwhelmed the music. One such occasion was Bowie’s 1979 Saturday Night Live appearance, which occurred during his Berlin cabaret phase. He wore an Expressionist suit, but instead of pants it had a kind of conical skirt so constraining Bowie couldn’t walk. He had to be carried to the microphone by two backup singers. The usual Bowie effect is that he feels perfectly at ease in our unease. In this performance, in this absurd suit, we feel his unease as he awkwardly moves his hands around in a vain effort to find the song’s rhythm. 

My companions in the exhibit tour had very similar experiences in the SNL performance and Diamond Dog gallery in the MCA exhibit. More than one person told me at this point, “He was one weird guy.” No one elaborated, but I knew what they meant. The David Bowie of the 1970s was all persona and no person. No one glimpsed from behind the masks to check if we were having fun, or let us know he was having a good time. Even his 1972 declaration that he was gay was unconvincing, and still is.

The great “Ashes to Ashes” video from 1980 emerges as a key text in his career. Bowie performs in an elegant jester suit (above, foreground). The images are gently surreal, the music catchy and self-referential. Bowie appears relaxed, demonstrating his New Romantic sweetness—quite a change from the free-floating hostility of Diamond Dogs or the drony histrionics of Heroes. Step a few feet to the left and the transformation is complete. The “Let’s Dance” video (1983) features a conventionally-clad Bowie looking out onto a world of very real hardship. For the first time, Bowie acknowledges that he might be part of the problem rather than its deviant solution. An Aborigine girl gets to don the transformative red shoes. A decade before, Bowie would have snatched them for himself. 

By this point he’s reached his imaginary phase. He doesn’t appear more authentic, more himself, so much as less mediated. A contiguity begins to form between his inner self, whatever that might be, and his outer self, about which we know too much.  At last he doesn’t have to invent a genre for himself. Once electronic dance music develops in the 1990s all he has to do is record a few hits and show off a few dance moves. Alas, a David Bowie without the drama of his own self-invention is a less interesting person and performer, and David Bowie Is loses interest in its subject once he settles into his final persona, Thin White Uncle David. 

David Bowie Is is structured around its subject’s development from cramped 1950’s Brixton to the wide-open and genial spaces of the rock imaginary. The lasting impression isn’t how weird Bowie was but how much great music he created. Remarkably, over a long career of radical changes, he made only one real misstep, a mid-1990s dalliance with sado-masochistic surrealism on the Outsider album and tour. In the end one is left wondering if Bowie’s journey is all that deviant. His career is a highly inventive version of the changes a lot of us go through. He went from a confining youth to the experimental self-invention of early adulthood before finally finding one’s middle-aged comfort zone of easy dance music and loose-fitting clothes. To be sure, Bowie skipped over the period of middle-aged spread hidden by a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt. Then again, most of us wouldn’t appear in public wearing a kind of onesie festooned with calligraphic Japanese rabbits, what the older Bowie dismissed as “that absurd bunny costume.” 

 

If you go: the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art is the only American stop for the David Bowie Is exhibition. It runs here through January 4, 2015. Tickets are $25 for adults for a timed admission. Included is a set of headphones you wear throughout the exhibit. The experience is immersive if occasionally disorienting. Be patient and allow yourself 90-120 minutes to go through the whole thing. Yes, it takes that long. We had to be shooed away after 90 minutes because the museum was closing. The galleries devoted to his early years have a lot of small objects and the explanatory cards are close together, leading to some logjams. Initially I got stuck behind a near-sighted couple who read slowly. Later galleries open up and allow for more leisurely perusal. Finally, make sure you have access to a lot of David Bowie songs, because you’re going to want to listen to them afterward.

Note: the photos in this post were mostly taken professional photographers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the exhibition originated. Photographs were not allowed in the MCA exhibit. The Chicago exhibit has all the same elements as London, just adapted to the MCA space. 

The Umbrella Revolution Takes Shape

Mashable has a nice overview of the images generated by the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong.

 

Photo of the Day: Almost post-apocalyptic scene of empty HK highway, blocked by city's ongoing protests pic.twitter.com/tPD6atADxa v @ianbremmer

— Urbanphoto (@urbanphoto_blog) September 30, 2014

Jeff Koons in the Age of Inequality

Jeff Koons, the subject of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum, is the inheritor of the Dadaist readymade tradition, which was Modernism’s running joke at its own commodification. The Dada artwork was more of an act than an object. The artist chose a commonplace object, stripped away all vestiges of use value, leaving the husk of exchange value as its only source of meaning.

Koons began his career with a series of Dadaist gestures. His earliest artworks were household appliances bathed in fluorescent light, like a cleanser used by angels. Koons must have been attracted to the childishness inherent in Dada, with its impulsivity and blankness of consciousness. Also, there’s a childlike faith in the magical power of the word “art” to fundamentally transform the essence of something. And while Koons has elaborated Dadaist technique into something more post-modern, he’s retained the movement’s childishness in his eagerness to please, his complete lack of discrimination, and his enduring appreciation for the erotic power of mid-century advertising.

One of Koons’s trademarks is the way he finishes his artworks just past the bounds of irony or art. His method is reproduction, but instead of vanquishing the art object’s aura, he constructs it anew so that the original and its copies have collapsed into a single object that is singular yet estranged from itself. If a Koons artwork stares back at you, it does so lewdly.

"What is the point of this art?” Hal Foster asks. "Koons claims he wants to relieve us of our shame, which is why he focuses on two subjects where humiliation runs deep – sex and class.” Indeed, Koons’s work has the same faint whiff of masochism as Andy Warhol’s. But sex and class aren’t conjoined the same was now as they were in Koons’s 1980s and ‘90s heyday. Class, for one, is creeping slowly toward the Real, into the realm of distinction Koons shies away from.

Koons says he wants to "give a viewer a sense of themselves being packaged, to whatever level they’re looking for. Just to instil a sense of self-confidence, self-worth. That’s my interest in Pop.” Foster endorses this view of Koons’s work, but gives it a twist. Koons’s faith in Pop Art "suits a neoliberal ideology that seeks to promote our ‘self-confidence’ and ‘self-worth’ as human capital – that is, as skill-sets we are compelled to develop as we shift from one precarious job to another.” This particular belief has always been a sucker’s game, and while Koons wants his art to be generous towards its audience, his career exactly coincides with the rise of an ungenerous economic order. He may draw on tchotchkes for inspiration, but the resulting artworks are affordable only to hedge fund managers.

The Strange and Unhappy Story of Degenerate Art

The Neue Gallerie's exhibition, Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, chronicles the Nazis' famously botched attempt to rid Germany of all art that didn't look like something Hitler would like. It's not a big exhibition, but no matter. The exhibition's purpose is simple: to show the awfulness of Nazi art and to remind us of the ironic and often sad stories behind the what the Nazis called Entartete Kunst, or degenerate art.

The line between Nazi art and Entartete Kunst was never very clear, even to the upper echelons of the Nazi government. For a long time Joseph Goebbels was interested in Expressionism--he had an eye for pain--and almost succeeded in making it the house style of Nazi Germany, which would have been extremely peculiar. After Hitler reclassified Expressionism as degenerate, one of Goebbels' favorite painters, Emil Nolde could neither paint nor join the Nazi party, itself an Expressionist situation.

Meanwhile, Adolf Ziegler's triptych The Four Elements was displayed prominently as a model for German art. After the exhibition Hitler hung the paintings over his fireplace and gazed at them until he grew bored, at which point he took them down and had the artist sent to Dachau. There his physical presence must have had the same effect as his paintings: a few moments of fascination while you take him in, followed by utter indifference. Ziegler survived Dachau and later disappeared into obscurity.

The Four Elements is a genuinely dreadful painting. The four figures are festooned with symbols of something--the exact representational program of German fascism had yet to be worked out. They also sport pubic hair, which must have been the specifically Aryan touch. Compare Ziegler's painting to Ernst Kirchner's A Group of Artists (The Painters of the Brücke). Kirchner has crammed his four figures into an utterly unheroic space. Each artist has his own mood. They look off-putting but hardly a threat to the social order. In fact, the painters of die Brücke, or the Bridge, had the seemingly respectable goal of bringing great German art up to date.

If you saw the Kirchner in its home institution Cologne, Germany, the painting would appear as a ruminative example of mid-Twenties German Modernism. In the Neue Gallerie's exhibition A Group of Artists takes on a dangerous aura because we're asked to look at it through the eyes of its historical audience. When they gazed upon the artworks in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, what did they see, looking from the cusp of totalitarianism? The experience must have been a kind of double displacement: Kirchner and his fellow degenerate artists represented a rejection of past values, as well as a rejection of the values to come.

A $100,000 Bill on the Floor: An Interview with Leslie Lyons, JB Wilson, and Joey Yates

The Brooklyn-based artist Leslie Lyons first appeared in this space in 2010 when I wrote about her exhibition Instant Messaging. Currently Lyons is participating in the exhibition Press: Artist and Machine at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. Her contribution to the exhibition is BANK, from Unswept Floors, a series of works based upon ancient Roman artifacts. 

I posed a series of questions to Lyons about her contribution to the Press exhibition. During our conversations, which were conveyed over email, we pulled in two more key figures: Joey Yates, the curator of the Press exhibition, and JB Wilson, Lyons’s collaborator on the Unswept Floors series. 

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How does the Press exhibition fit into the history of the printing press? 

Yates: The ultimate goal with Press: Artist and Machine was to exhibit a multitude of ways that artists have combined their practices with the printing press. Through our display of over 60 works we reflect on the word "press" as both a noun and a verb. Beginning with the visionary work of William Blake and the artisan revivals of William Morris we move into the 21st century to take a look at the ongoing work by contemporary artists who have likewise exploited the machine press to explore issues related to politics, identity, art history and the changing landscape of mass communication.

How has contemporary art impacted contemporary crafts?

Yates: As contemporary art practice expands, taking on more and more terms, the field grows with respect to new technology and global shifts that look not just at western ideas of art and craft but how other cultures have historically made less distinctions between the two modes of creativity. In American culture it could be said that contemporary craft practices have actually made more of an impact on contemporary art as in the case of Judy Chicago and other combinations of art and activism that grew out of the sexual revolution of the 1970's and the protests from Act-Up in the 1980's. These shifts in art were lead not by individuals, but by collaborative efforts among artisans from multiple disciplines, like quilting and graphic design, as well as non-artists who were skilled in organizing important rallies, demonstrations, and performances that created a new awareness in how culture is made and disseminated.

How did you get involved in the exhibition?

Lyons: When curator Joey Yates sent an invitation to present work in the Press, Artist and Machine exhibition, he included his treatment for the show. I was most intrigued by the context and social practice aspect he would feature using work by William Blake, Kinji Akagawa and other practitioners of art as it served function. He was taking both the physical action of the printing press and also the idea of it as it related to culture and knowledge. At that time, I was developing a series with the artist JB Wilson called the Unswept Floors, which reaches back to an ancient Roman practice of tile mosaics. These floors would be commissioned to portray table scraps that had fallen from the extravagant dinner parties featured in the more prominent villas around Rome. I recently photographed one in person when I visited Rome in April. It was recovered in the 1960’s and is housed at the Vatican Museum. You can learn so much from this kind of material culture and what appeals to me isn’t that these floors were celebrated as high art back then; they were functional but served as art and a status symbol. Not only could the hosts throw lavish parties and import exotic food but they could hire an artist to portray the waste. They flaunted their decadence - even privately.

Wilson: Research on American culture is at the heart of my practice and that is what excites me most about the Unswept Floors series.  Exploring and commenting on decadence using the medium of tile and what we discard onto the floor is inspiring; especially the simple act of the celebration of that decadence by producing the work itself.  That is what fascinates me most about the original Unswept Floor mosaics that we have referenced and what Leslie shot on her recent trip to Rome.  Obviously, the wealthy Romans who could afford to commission mosaics into their home could choose whatever they wanted as the content.  It was the choice to display wasted delicacies as a statement of excess for the purpose of celebrating wealth and power that turns me on and reveals something about their culture.  

Here in 21st century America, I would say we are more reserved socially than the Romans may have been.  But there are still excesses and powerful, wealthy people who indulge.  I am moved as a contemporary artist to look through an ancient lens into our contemporary social systems and produce modern Unswept Floors.

 

Leslie Lyons and JB Wilson, Bathroom Floor, 2012

Lyons: JB and I had been making these floors with the modern process of sublimation using photography. One, Bathroom Floor, was exhibited in Miami during Art Basel in 2012 but we had not yet secured a gallery show to convey the larger idea of this practice. Conceptually, we loved feeling connected to this ancient idea and felt that there were similarities we could convey between the Roman era and notions of decadence in America today. We began exploring both particular evidence we could use as social commentary as well as our own personal lives since the Unswept Floors were literally a home decorating idea. But we also decided that making the work ourselves was going to be important. As a photographer, I had been wanting to use images in a new way and apply them to a more inter-disciplinary practice. JB was already working in tile and owned the actual machine press to make the image transfers. So, we began producing the work and I think this combination of idea coupled with the fact that we physically press the tiles ourselves made the work attractive for the Press exhibition.

 

 Leslie Lyons and JB Wilson, BANK, 2013

What we decided to present and what Joey also chose was the BANK tiles series from the Unswept Floors. This isn’t a tableaux like Bathroom Floor, which consists of 54 tiles and lays out a specific scene from our personal lives. It is one full bleed image transferred to 12” x 12” tiles then randomly placed and grouted together. The installation in Press is a 64-tile piece. This work takes on our current complicated relationship with money as a society. It features a multitude of $100 dollar bill(s) and a $100,000 which was in circulation at one time between the big banks to make large transfers. The design aspect when the installation is viewed gives an overwhelming sense of wealth. But the layers for us as artists, conceptually, break down to our comment on this idea. The $100 bills are actually only one bill with the same serial number so the images convey a false sense of wealth - it isn’t real. And the $100,000 bill is very significant because it features Woodrow Wilson, the president who signed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Wilson was quoted later saying “I am the most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

I'm curious--how did you get your hands on a $100,000 bill?

Lyons: From my end, I am foremost a journalist, always looking for the story and seeking out the social angle and implications.

I began researching how to go about accessing a $100,000 bill and getting someone to agree to let us photograph it.  JB indulged me for a few weeks then diplomatically reminded me that we live in a time where we could access this image in a matter of seconds.

This is a truthful fact but also honest in relation to JB's work.  My introduction to him was through his series, I Am An American, where he compiled hundreds of appropriated images into large-scale light boxes - each making their own comment on American culture.

So, we grabbed an image of the $100,000 bill off the Internet and claimed it as process.

Wilson: We found the $100,000 bill on Wikipedia as appropriation is part of my practice. I realize that appropriation is a bit of an issue with art these days but it is a reflection of how the majority of people in our culture assimilate information in the 21st century which makes it a valid resource for art, in my opinion. Because of this, for me, it is truthful in my practice. We have the world at our fingertips and this applies to art.

 

Leslie Lyons and JB Wilson, BRASS, 2013

Lyons: [The Woodrow Wilson quote] makes me think of the author, Michael Lewis. I love his books. My father played in the NFL so I practically inhaled The Blind Side. But it is his first book, Liar’s Poker, that relates to BANK. Michael Lewis graduated from Princeton with an art history degree then became a financial analyst with Salomon Brothers. He left to write Liar’s Poker which, just by the subtitle should tell you mostly what the book is about. The full title is called Liar’s Poker, Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street. I read the book but it was an interview with Lewis that really struck me. He seemed to write Liar’s Poker as a warning to the calculated recklessness of Wall Street and bond trading. It was an awakening to Lewis that less than scrupulous people on Wall Street could take advantage of others ignorance and become extremely wealthy. But, he said, when the book was published people didn’t react by wanting to clean up the financial industry. Instead, he had students in MBA programs all over the country writing to him asking ‘How can I get in on this?’. Amazing, right? What does this say about our culture? Our interdependence on one another? Our responsibility as citizens? I am still trying to answer these questions and BANK is a manifestation of this inquiry.

Actually, it is this idea of art as inquiry that seems to connect all of the work in the Press exhibition for me.

 Press: Artist and Machine runs through June 1, 2014. 

The Art of Useless Suffering

The art as therapy idea is back, thanks to Alain de Botton.

In a surprise move, the Netherlands’ top cultural institution, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, has been turned into a giant therapeutic centre designed to help people with emotional issues. The operation has been masterminded by two intellectuals, author Alain de Botton and art historian John Armstrong. The building has been decked out in banners screaming ‘Art is Therapy’ at the city, 200 works have been equipped with giant captions next to them, detailing the therapeutic benefits on offer, and six new rooms have been created to shed light on such themes as ‘Sex’, ‘Love’ and ‘Money.’ The show is expected to last until the autumn.

The reaction was swift and predicable.

This move has, naturally, created outrage among the cultural elite. ‘The idea that art should help people to live is a piece of babyish absurdity we should all have grown out of long ago,’ declared the Guardian‘s fiery chief art critic, Adrian Searle. The New York Times similarly cast off its normal restraints to declare: ‘Reducing art to self-help is the greatest imaginable insult to the masterpieces of culture.’

Great art can survive insults even from the art therapy movement. However, the philosopher Emmanual Levanas has the concept of "useless suffering," which is exactly the opposite of art therapy. According to Levanas, pain disrupts our ability to experience anything with any kind of coherence. We can't communicate effectively, but this is good because pain disrupts our interior life so much that we are forced to realize we're dependent on other people. Latching on to the wholeness of canonical art sooths the wounded autonomy of the self while obscuring the difficult demands placed on us by other people and the world in general.

The cure? Difficult, disruptive, demanding Modernist art. No comforting harmonies there, just the theraputic demand from the Other, symbolizing the experience of pain so it is out there in the space between self and Other, where it belongs. 

Suburbia Gone Wild

The blandness and conformity of suburbia is an old theme--and considering the increasing demographic diversity of American suburbs, an inaccurate one. However, photographer Martin Adolfsson's book Suburbia Gone Wild: How Suburbia Is Conquering the World reveals the extent to which Western-styled (or is it American?) suburbia has reproduced itself. The photograph below, which could have been taken in a house on my street in suburban Chicago, was shot in Shanghai.

I question the title--the phenomenon Adolfsson records doesn't strike me as "wild" except perhaps in its proliferation of sameness. But his visual style recalls the proto-Surrealist photographer Eugène Atget. Walter Benjamin's remarks about Atget could equally apply to Adolfsson. Atget's photography, Benjamin writes, reveals

physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things--meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.

 

How Arthur Danto Helped Revive the Study of Aesthetics

The great philosopher of aesthetics Arthur Danto died on October 25, 2013. Crispin Sartwell explains the distressed state of aesthetics as a discipline in the 1960s, when Danto first started writing about art.

Art and philosophy [. . .] had gone their separate ways, and were conceived as opposing and incompatible cultural zones. Danto developed an ingenious (if not unproblematic) reconnection that was also a revival and transformation of all the traditional questions of philosophical aesthetics. Indeed, in his view, the avant-garde art of the period and analytic philosophy were not just compatible, they were made for each other. In developments like pop art and conceptualism, he asserted, art had become a form of philosophy, which is one thing he meant when he said that art was over. Whether this was exactly true or not, it mirrored his own development in its synthesis of the sensual and the intellectual.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

As a graduate student in philosophy in the 1980's, Sartwell fell under the spell of Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, as did I as a graduate studen in the 1990s. Danto is closely associated with analytical aesthetics, but Danto never felt obligated to remain within its strictures.  Transfiguration addresses the question, What is a work of art? This question became especially pressing with Pop Art of the 1960s, when art took the form of ordinary consumer objects. What does Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans possess that makes it a work of art and not a mere reproduction of cans of soup? What made Danto interesting, and indespensable, was that he realized that same types of questions could be asked of citizenship. What makes someone a citizen of a certain country? What quality do we need in order to be an American citizen? In citizenship as in art the answer does not lie on the surface.

Bookshelfies

Salon picked up on the Bookshelfie phenomenon, calling it "vanity for introverts," a snarky and inaccurate term. The Bookshelfie is a selfie with book covers. The format is simple. There's a self-portrait, taken with a camera phone, a brief commentary on the photograph, and a list of the books in the photograph. Sunglasses are optional, but highly recommended.

Here's a recent example:

Most of the Tumblr entries are by people in their twenties, often considered to be an age of solipsism. But I don't see solipsism or vanity in the Bookselfie.

By the time one reaches one's twenties one has pretty much ceased to be the sole subject of a photograph. Children tend to be photographed individually being themselves--or rather, being more than themselves. A prop or two may appear in the frame, but the child is usually the center of interest. 

As a person moves beyond the domestic sphere and enters the social realm, solo photographs disappear almost all together, to be replaced by photographs of the self with something, or more commonly, someone else. And once a person becomes a parent the likelihood that they will appear as the sole subject of a photograph goes down to almost zero. The more adult one becomes, the more they disappear into a swarm of images and words.

In the Bookselfie the subject still appears with something else. Instead of being captured, by chance, with other people, the Bookselfie is deliberately planned. This may be the source of the "vanity" the Salon editors saw. To me, the Bookselfie is an attempt to control one's own image, to choose with what they will appear. The Bookselfie makes the internal visible. Just as the photograph of a child marks a certain moment in time, in the development of a child, which every parent cherishes, the Bookselfie marks a moment in time: the progression of the mind.