Art
Theory of the Selfie
CHICAGO — OxfordDictionaries.com recently announced that ‘selfie’ is their new Word of the Year, moving it beyond sanctified slang in the Urban Dictionary.
Alicia Eler
Alicia Eler is a cultural critic and arts reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and author of "The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture" (2017).
Art
Dumb Racist Art Project: White Woman Sells Naked Oprah
Artist and fashion designer Peggy Noland's four dresses of Oprah's face Photoshopped onto variously sized black female bodies perpetuate American pop culture's rampant racism. Modeled by a white woman, the dresses suggest that anyone can go ahead and "try on" a black woman's body in sizes "petite, a
Art
Flushing Nothing Down the Tubes
CHICAGO — If Jean Genet shit out the text from his book The Thief's Journal, which he wrote on toilet paper while in prison, and cheerleaders barfed up blood and guts in high school, they might combined look like the conceptual results of Oakland-based Jason Benson's PH://Dungeon_Mix_[vol.1]://The_H
Art
Peace to the Selfies
CHICAGO — It's been a minute since I checked the selfies [at] hyperallergic.com email account. I was avoiding your selfies after a brief hiatus spent understanding selfie discomfort and the public gaze.
Art
Who Is the Real Monster in Frankenstein?
CHICAGO — There's an archetypal monster in your mind, and his name is Frankenstein. In a lecture presented this past Saturday, November 9, at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Heather Keenleyside discussed this notorious monster in relation to this year's theme "Animal: What Makes Us Human?"
Art
Remaking "Carrie" in the Age of Social Media
CHICAGO — Boys don't cry, and young girls fight back with their psychic powers in director Kimberly Peirce’s films. This past Saturday in Chicago, Peirce, the director of Boys Don't Cry, Stop-Loss, and most notably the new remake of Carrie, took to the stage with WBEZ reporter Alison Cuddy at Franci
Art
Trust My Selfie
CHICAGO — "In the world of networked individuals, it is the person who is the focus: not the family, not the work unit, not the neighborhood, and not the social group," write authors Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman in their 2012 book Networked: The New Social Operating System.
Art
A Hair Museum Houses the Strands of Yesteryear
CHICAGO — Leila's Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri, bills itself as the only hair museum of its kind in the world. Located in the back of Leila's Independence College of Cosmetology, an unassuming storefront covered by a mirror-like material.
Interview
Powering Through Detroit's Many –isms
CHICAGO — This morning at a café in a gentrified neighborhood of Chicago, I sat reading Facebook on my iPhone and came across yet another story relating to Detroit, the city frequently cited for its riches-to-poverty story.
Art
Stop Freaking Out About Funeral Selfies
CHICAGO — We haven't figured out the boundaries of a private vs. public internet. For one, it's a highly subjective matter and doesn't require hard and fast rules — especially not for the teenagers who are shaping it.
Interview
New Small Press Seeks Big Old Letterpress
CHICAGO — Reports of print's death have been greatly exaggerated. Outpost Magazine is one testament to this; another is Meekling Press, a very small Chicago-based book press that is committed to creating small editions of hand-bound books, as well as paperback editions.
Interview
A Skate Park as Neighborhood Stabilization in Detroit
CHICAGO — An artist-run non-profit organization, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope's Power House Productions works to develop and implement neighborhood stabilization strategies in Detroit, a city where property is cheap and the stakes are high.