Salon is soon to be located. Please see below for text and check back with us for the new location.
Dates, times and readings are listed below. Simply click the links to download the .pdfs, read and show up.
For updated information please call +1 305 923 3387
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Salon is hosted by Richard Haden
The selected text for the month will be: Uses of Camp [No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, ch. 5] by Andrew Ross.
But what is camp? The difficulty in defining camp suggests an elusive complexity. Not everyone is privy to it; not everyone understands the joke. The ambiguity or lack of concrete definition of camp is a protective mechanism that also serves and protects its adherents, its community. Camp is significantly involved in recognizing and playing with paradox and contradiction. Philip Core’s encyclopedia of camp defines it as Jean Cocteau’s characterization of himself — “the lie that tells the truth” (qtd. in Ross 63). Cf. Pablo Picasso’s definition of art as “a lie that tells the truth.” Note the linkage between camp and art or artifice. Camp has to do with appearances, posing and troubling the notion of the “natural.” In his essay “The Uses of Camp” Andrew Ross traces the etymology of camp from the French verb se camper, meaning to pose (62). Oscar Wilde’s epigram from The Picture of Dorian Gray about naturalness as merely another pose exemplifies the spirit of camp–its irony, humor, and aestheticism. Aestheticism seeks to promote and praise the artificial. Camp’s parody flouts the sacredness or the faith in the notions of “natural” and “original.”
Andrew Ross has persuasively argued that camp sensibility occurs “when the products […] of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste”….Ross notes: camp is a “rediscovery of history’s waste” (320).
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Tuesday January 24th @ 7pm reading Warren Buckland’s Making Sense of Lost Highway from the book Puzzle Films Complex Story Telling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, and watching the subject of the essay, David Lynch’s Lost Highway.
Excerpt: Introduction: Puzzle Plots, Warren Buckland.
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Tuesday December 20th @ 7pm reading Tom Sherman’s Vernacular Video.
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Tuesday September 20th @ 7pm reading Artie Vierkant’s ‘ The Image Object Post-Internet‘.
For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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Tuesday September 6th @ 7pm reading Henry Jenkins’ ‘So You Want To Teach Pornography?‘
Excerpt:
“So you want to teach Pornography?
Good for you, but you had better be prepared for some of the challenges of integrating sexually explicit media into the classroom. I had taught porn in my classes at MIT for almost a decade without complaint or controversy. I didn’t realize I was performing without a net…
…as this story made the rounds, it got less and less accurate. I went from ‘teaching about pornography’ to ‘teaching a whole class on pornography’ to ‘advocating that students consume or produce pornography’…
Why teach pornography?…. 1. Public policy debate…. 2. legal and political discourse….3. Pornography has been a driving force behind technological development and deployment of almost every media…4. Pornography has emerged as a key area for feminist scholarship and theory….5. Pornography is an enormous economic force….6. Pornography poses powerful questions about the relationship between form, content and ideology….7. The consumption of pornography poses important questions about the nature of fantasy….8. Even if we decided not to teach pornography, it is increasingly difficult to know where we draw the line…”
For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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Tuesday August 16th @ 7pm reading Jan Verwoert’s “EXHAUSTION & EXUBERANCE – Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform.”
“In artistic practice this dedication to imagining other ways to enjoy consumption means claiming the imagination and the aesthetic experience as a field of collective agency where workable forms of resistance can be devised.”
With apologies, our regular PDF download is not available at this time. For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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Tuesday August 2nd @ 7pm reading David Ley’s ‘Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification‘.
The summary: Gentrification involves the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment. This paper reconsiders the role of artists as agents, and aestheticisation as a process, in contributing to gentrification, an argument illustrated with empirical data from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Because some poverty neighborhoods may be candidates for occupation by artists, who value their affordability and mundane, off-center status, the study also considers the movement of districts from a position of high cultural capital and low economic capital to a position of steadily rising economic capital. The paper makes extensive use of Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the field of cultural production, including his discussion of the uneasy relations of economic and cultural capitals, the power of the aesthetic disposition to valorise the mundane and the appropriation of cultural capital by market forces. Bourdieu’s thinking is extended to the field of gentrification in an account that interprets the enhanced valuation of cultural capital since the 1960s, encouraging spatial proximity by other professionals to the inner-city habitus of the artist. This approach offers some reconciliation to theoretical debates in the gentrification literature about the roles of structure and agency and economic and cultural explanations. It also casts a more critical historical perspective on current writing lauding the rise of the cultural economy and the creative city.
For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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Tuesday July 19th @ 7pm reading Christoph Cox’s ‘Sound Art and the Sonic Unconcious‘. Along with the Text discussion there will also be examples of sound art to listen to.
For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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Tuesday July 5th @ 7pm reading Christian Hubert’s ‘Time’ and Edward Jayne’s ‘The Metaphor-Metonymy Binarism’.
For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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Tuesday June 14th @ 7pm reading the first essay from a collection of essays titled “Speculations 1″. This short collection tries to lay the ground work for a new philosophical / anti-philosophical discourse–Speculative Realism.
“What is speculative realism? Many readers of this journal will already have a more or less precise understanding of the defining traits of this movement, while other—perhaps more sceptical—readers will want to get a better grasp of what the fuss is all about. My aim in this paper is not so much to give a definite answer to this question, but rather to propose a sketch of the causes, conditions and the network of actors which has led to the generation of such a diverse—and at times seemingly contradictory—philosophical trend.”
For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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Tuesday May 3rd @ 7 pm reading Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Altermodern”
“Altermodernism … is neither a petrified kind of time advancing in loops (postmodernism) nor a linear vision of history (modernism), but a positive experience of disorientation through an art-form exploring all dimensions of the present”
For the source please visit: http://www.littleriveryachtclub.org/salon-night/
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