Social destruction  

OK, I'm back. The last month has been crazy, with all kinds of familial obligations, a change of address, an injury, a couple of minor obsessions (of which blogging clearly wasn't one), a seemingly catastrophic computer issue that turned out not to be, and the short-lived acquisition of some barely grammatical (but still serviceable) Italian. I've also been prepping for the Chicago marathon. I suppose all this is behind the unprecedented (at least since Feb 2003) failure to blog around here, but there's also just the fact that it seems to get harder to start writing again the longer I go without writing.

Anyway, I'll be back with more soon about Head Start, which has been on my mind lately because of my job, but for now let me just link to this post on the demise of theory, which ties it to the 20th century avant garde (subsequently arguing that, as with the avant garde, some theory will essentially go mainstream while the rest just vanishes). I don't have much to say about this comparison, but I found the article depressing because the whole argument is predicated on the notion that the avant garde is passe, which I find incomprehensible and somewhat disorienting. Maybe the avant garde is too central to my conception of art in the first place, but I don't see how the contemporary formulation of art as oriented toward experience, and in particular political experience, does anything for art or for experience. It's as if art is moving toward a sort of made for TV movie paradigm, because our experiences have to be validated. Isn't that kind of boring? Maybe you can tell I've been reading Andre Breton.