Stuart Noble

No Social Media Allowed!

Physical space as a retreat from cyberspace.

Jib Jab Obama

PoMoBama

Thanks to BNN and the great community of commenters there, I was led to this set of images from the Obama family’s visit to the Pompidou Museum in Paris. Shaw’s playful post title, The Artful President, certainly leaves plenty of room for interpretation. I’ve filed these images to come back to later when I explore the Obama candidacy’s engagement with the art world. The culture signals emanating from the Obama White House are undeniably postmodern, cosmopolitan and even transnational. I had originally assumed that the intense advocacy of his candidacy from the art world developed as an independent phenomenon. But perhaps Team Obama was actively cultivating that energy earlier than what I had figured?

Related, and equally interesting to my research was this piece byAmy Chozick and Kelly Crow for the WSJ, “Changing the Art on the White House Walls.”

Here, the diverse representation by African-American, Asian, Hispanic and female artists during the campaign is being brought into the White House.

(image: Pete Souza/White House. Paris. June 6, 2006. WH Flickr stream)

folksonomies in academia

Read “The Age of Digital Citation,” no doubt already part of the growing para-academic folksonomic canon. Via academicdave’s tweet.

It is an age for the flourishing of scholars who have the time to read deeply and the energy to think outside of the canon. This is what’s scary about it: to keep up in the age of digital citation, scholars will have to master a series of intellectual prostheses – tagging circles, artificial reading bots, quick skimming – that will help them navigate through the masses of texts. The age of digital citation will punish scholars who merely reduplicate the canons of their mentors. This is what’s exciting about it: you no longer have to go to a university to find out what books are on the canon.

A call for action?

Numerian offered an interesting (if too forgiving) take on Jon, always the right-wing concern troll in centrist clothing, Meacham’s latest frontpage charade. But what concerned me most was not so much the article, which isn’t entirely horrible, but the cover image and what it communicates.

Keep in mind that Newsweek’s covers reach a huge segment of the population in contrast to the number of actual magazine readers. Despite an ever deeper shift towards digital information, Newsweek covers remain a dominant feature of our daily visual culture. Millions and millions of eyeballs glance these images daily at grocery stores, airports, public street corners and private waiting rooms. And Newsweek has been on a role lately.

Without digging too deep into our bag of semiotic analytical tools, the blood red cross suspended against a solid, pitch black background no doubt will evoke different meanings for different readers.

But the black, which could represent;  the abyss, the apocalypse, or perhaps even Obama, doesn’t inspire much, “gee, I think its a good thing America is becoming a post-Christian nation.” Is the red not just symbolic of the blood of Christ but the blood of Christian Americans sacrificed to the new “secular liberal order?” The text of “Christian America” is crushed under the weight of the “DECLINE.” Might  the arrangement of the text then also suggest that it’s not only Christian America but America in general which will be consumed in darkness? Christianity under siege? A call for action?

What do you see (and feel) when presented with this image?

Robert Gibbons at America Adrift

Over at America Adrift we are pleased to announce that Robert Gibbons has graciously submitted a piece for our readers. America Adrift, as an informal blog of sorts, does not claim any publishing rights to any work submitted. Our writers and contributors own their own words. While The Oblique Angle will undoubtedly be formally published elsewhere, we are very privileged to post it here first for our readers.