Right now an exhibit called "Richteriana" is on exhibit at Postmasters, a gallery located in West Chelsea. As the title suggests, the exhibit is by no means a straight-up reification of Richter's status as a father of conceptualist painting. Nor, however, is it a disavowal of his significance. Instead it's something much more interesting: an attempt to look at the different forces—the buyers and sellers, critics and academics and museums—that establish the "worth" of an artist.

Sell the story of an artist, and you might just sell a painting too. The particular stories that have cultivated Richter’s status as Germany’s most heralded living artist now occasion Richter paintings to [...]

"Airmindedness” is a term that used to be everywhere and now it's nowhere. The word, as defined by the OED, means an interest in and enthusiasm for the use and development of aircraft. The expression emerged with the development of the airplane in the early twentieth century, during which an entire generation struggled to expand their conceptual boundaries skywards. Prompted by the invention of mechanical flight, this airminded cultural moment was sustained by the military incentives that ceaselessly pushed for improvements to air power.

As media critic Friedrich Kittler proposes, technologies repeatedly find their ancestry in the mouth of war: “war was called the father of all [...]

After publishing Richard Morgan's account of his life as a freelance writer, we heard from someone who'd been both a freelance writer and an editor at a major newspaper. "Was there a time, a long time ago, when editors and writers weren't at war with one another?" he asked. Although one would think a congenial relationship between the two would lead to clearer and more cohesive writing, writers and editors do indeed seem to be locked in perpetual conflict. How did we reach such levels of animosity? I looked to the historical record.

On May 6, 1924, the New York Times announced: "'BREVITIES' OWNERS INDICTED FOR FRAUD." Broadway Brevities and Society Gossip, published between 1916-1924, belonged to Stephen G. Clow, a native Canadian who traveled down south to become proprietor of one of the shadiest gossip magazines of New York City. The trial of Clow and his partners lasted until January 30, 1925 and was deemed as the "greatest show on earth" by the New York Sunday News. The result: Clow was fined $6000 and sentenced to six years in federal prison in Atlanta.

In the final episode of "Freaks and Geeks," the Freaks group leader Daniel Desario accepts an invitation to play Dungeons & Dragons with the notoriously geeky A/V club. Surprised by Daniel’s warm receptivity to the game, the Geeks wonders what this means for their future status. As Bill puts it: "Does him wanting to play with us again mean he's turning into a geek or we're turning into cool guys?" Sam answers, "I'm going to go for us becoming cool guys." It's a nice ambiguous note on which to end the show.

Outside the universe of "Freaks and Geeks," a similar drift has occurred. Geekiness has accrued cachet, and [...]

The New York Times addresses current issues in three ways: as expressions of guidance on the editorial page, as expressions of individual opinion on the op-ed page, and as worthy (or not) of news coverage or analysis in the rest of the paper. It has grappled with how to cover Israel, for instance. And for the last 30 years, it has struggled with how to cover gay people. Now the paper has moved in all three departments from following to leading, from first using the word "homosexual" in 1926 to (tardily) using the word "gay" to pioneering gay wedding announcements. What can we learn about the paper's [...]