> Linguistic indirection is something of a hallmark of the cultural heritage sector and while it may sometimes be necessary for financial or budgetary reasons it is, in most cases, profoundly harmful or at least a counter-productive distraction and a waste of time.
If linguistic indirection is a term of art, I'm not familiar with it, but it seems like a great way to describe this:
> Digital transformation is the manifestation through commercialization — which is to say financial means and industrial availability — of tools and processes whose introduction shines a light on issues and challenges which were always present but otherwise able to remain unseen.
I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.
> I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.
Good luck. After the first few paragraphs I though of a great quote that I heard somewhere: "Twitter ruined my reading skills, but it vastly improved my writing skills."
If you're trying to actually get a point across (vs. writing something that is just read for pleasure) GET TO THE DAMN POINT.
What distinguishes an Eames chair on display at the Cooper Hewitt from the same chair on display at MoMA or countless other museums in the world? What distinguishes it from the same chair on display, and for sale, at the Herman Miller showroom?
What, if not the stories that the institutions who collect these objects tell about them?
One of them is near enough to be a visited by me on a day trip. I can understand design museums being essentially franchised showrooms for contemporary culture objects, but I think he asks some reasonable questions about the point of curation and the role of museums in moden society.
The point is to provide local areas access to such designs in person. What they write on the wall about it is secondary to one's own opinion.
> If we assume that large language models are being used to generate these texts and if those models are able to faithfully and believably parody our long-standing assumptions of what those texts are expected to sound like then does it call in to question the entire practice of intellectualizing an artist's work in their unique voice?
I would say no. Authenticity is always in question. If the artist pasted LLM output wholesale, that was the choice they made to represent their work. Maybe they felt they expressed themselves in the prompt. What if they used a thesaurus, or a ghostwriter, or plagiarized something, or overheard someone say something they liked? It's up to the viewer to decide whether they find it meaningful or resonant.
That's the beauty of art. Intent matters, in that it can affect the interpretation, but ultimately any interpretation is valid.
My local museum had a room of poorly labeled and unlabeled objects that I loved and so I went down the rabbit hole of identifying and investigating most of them. Then I wrote the missing Wikipedia page for my favorite. If they had provided good labels I would never have gotten so knowledgeable about them.
What was your favorite?
”The Cooper Hewitt is a design museum and, like all design museums, it basically has all the same things that every other design museum has.”
Hah, touché.
Cooper Hewitt also happens to be inside Andrew Carnegie’s 19th century mansion on the Upper East Side, E 91st St. It reopens later this week with new exhibitions alongside the amazing house itself, the first floor of which is free entry while installation works are ongoing.
Hearst Castle but with an OG blue-candy iMac in it looking over the Jackie O reservoir instead of the Pacific.
He kind of lost me with the part about every object having a social media account, every plane at SFO having a social media account.
I started reading, then shifted to skimming, then abandoned it because it has said NOTHING in the first few screenfuls. is this a joke?
Super heady.
> Linguistic indirection is something of a hallmark of the cultural heritage sector and while it may sometimes be necessary for financial or budgetary reasons it is, in most cases, profoundly harmful or at least a counter-productive distraction and a waste of time.
If linguistic indirection is a term of art, I'm not familiar with it, but it seems like a great way to describe this:
> Digital transformation is the manifestation through commercialization — which is to say financial means and industrial availability — of tools and processes whose introduction shines a light on issues and challenges which were always present but otherwise able to remain unseen.
I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.
> I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.
Good luck. After the first few paragraphs I though of a great quote that I heard somewhere: "Twitter ruined my reading skills, but it vastly improved my writing skills."
If you're trying to actually get a point across (vs. writing something that is just read for pleasure) GET TO THE DAMN POINT.
What distinguishes an Eames chair on display at the Cooper Hewitt from the same chair on display at MoMA or countless other museums in the world? What distinguishes it from the same chair on display, and for sale, at the Herman Miller showroom?
What, if not the stories that the institutions who collect these objects tell about them?
One of them is near enough to be a visited by me on a day trip. I can understand design museums being essentially franchised showrooms for contemporary culture objects, but I think he asks some reasonable questions about the point of curation and the role of museums in moden society.
The point is to provide local areas access to such designs in person. What they write on the wall about it is secondary to one's own opinion.
> If we assume that large language models are being used to generate these texts and if those models are able to faithfully and believably parody our long-standing assumptions of what those texts are expected to sound like then does it call in to question the entire practice of intellectualizing an artist's work in their unique voice?
I would say no. Authenticity is always in question. If the artist pasted LLM output wholesale, that was the choice they made to represent their work. Maybe they felt they expressed themselves in the prompt. What if they used a thesaurus, or a ghostwriter, or plagiarized something, or overheard someone say something they liked? It's up to the viewer to decide whether they find it meaningful or resonant.
That's the beauty of art. Intent matters, in that it can affect the interpretation, but ultimately any interpretation is valid.
My local museum had a room of poorly labeled and unlabeled objects that I loved and so I went down the rabbit hole of identifying and investigating most of them. Then I wrote the missing Wikipedia page for my favorite. If they had provided good labels I would never have gotten so knowledgeable about them.
What was your favorite?
”The Cooper Hewitt is a design museum and, like all design museums, it basically has all the same things that every other design museum has.”
Hah, touché.
Cooper Hewitt also happens to be inside Andrew Carnegie’s 19th century mansion on the Upper East Side, E 91st St. It reopens later this week with new exhibitions alongside the amazing house itself, the first floor of which is free entry while installation works are ongoing.
Hearst Castle but with an OG blue-candy iMac in it looking over the Jackie O reservoir instead of the Pacific.
He kind of lost me with the part about every object having a social media account, every plane at SFO having a social media account.
I started reading, then shifted to skimming, then abandoned it because it has said NOTHING in the first few screenfuls. is this a joke?
[dead]