Is Our Reality Real? (Or Only The Reality We Create?)

“In the room we have a whirlwind of physical states. This whirlwind contains a lot more than a human being could ever perceive—atoms, neutrinos, photons, quarks, strings, quantum fields; a huge range of possibilities. When the body comes into the room, its sensory capacities carve out one possible subset of that whirlwind. Or, looked at the other way round, one possible set within the whirlwind finds, relative to the body, a suitable causal path along which to roll. So the table and the apple are born! My body brought them into existence in the sense that it selected them and only them from the whirlwind. Entirely ignoring all kinds of other stuff.”

At This Point, Tech Start-Ups Are Basically Conceptual Art

Damien Hirst turned himself into a high-value business (with Charles Saatchi as his venture-capitalist backer), argues Ian Bogost, and collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps play with form and procedure every bit as much as a work by, say, Yoko Ono. These days there are young tech companies whose ideas seem more conceptual art than practical idea.

A Political Whitney Biennial? Sure, But Not In A Partisan Way…

Reviewers have criticized past biennials for being too politicized and ideological. Director Adam Weinberg says that the biennial isn’t meant to lean left or right. The goal is to find “voices that really get very close to the bone of American culture…from an aesthetic point of view,” he says, “and also from a larger, cultural point of view.” He adds, “The exhibition is not a finger wagging, and it’s in no way trying to be hectoring or lecturing.”