terça-feira, 12 de julho de 2011

A DECADE OF NEGATIVE THINKING

The Positive News About Negative Thinking

by Abbe Schriber

Mira Schor
 Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life
When Osama bin Laden was assassinated earlier this year, it was an uncanny coincidence that I happened to be reading Mira Schor’s essay chronicling the days after September 11. The essay, “Weather Conditions in Lower Manhattan,” is published in Schor’s collection A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and epitomizes her interest in the raw tensions between past and present, as well as collective and personal trauma and memory. Despite its seemingly random placement, like the other essays in A Decade of Negative Thinking “Weather Conditions” considers these themes while invoking the differences between negativity and criticality. A full decade—its own “negative thinking” spurred by the rhetoric of the Bush/Cheney administration, Hurricane Katrina, economic meltdown, and two wars in the Middle East—has now passed since September 11. But the current, abject moment of bin Laden’s death seems to even further accentuate the timeliness of A Decade of Negative Thinking and its insistence on asking hard questions and promoting skepticism in a culture that is often overtly polemical, and in an art world that is often afraid to be “against” popular opinion.





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