💥✍ "What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice." (Roland Barthes' 𝘈 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳'𝘴 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦) Roberta Smith once said in conversation with Isabelle Graw that Peter Schjeldahl "would say you have to live someplace where you can lose a friend a day... a certain amount of density where you're sort of buffered". The audience laughed; Isabelle Graw too; me three. "Social distancing" is something the real art critic is practiced in. Those "art critics" that are entangled in the social networks or "social economy" via institutional association or friendship, as Isabelle put it back in 2014, are just telling themselves through some affirmative or empathetic action that this is the only way to go, especially if you want to get paid or avoid "social death" (Isabelle laughs). The term criticism comes from the Greek 𝘬𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘬ó𝘴 [Isabelle posits to Roberta] which means separating & distinguishing... But how do we negotiate this difference in an economy which entangles us? We are implicated in this market whether we want it or not as critics." Last May in Venice I read curator Ralph Rugoff's title for his Biennale as ironic fake news. As Ben Eastman put it: "MAY WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES… is a Chinese curse fabricated by Western scholars to reinforce a caricature of the East that might be interpreted as a warning: don’t trust everything you read; beware binary narratives; remember that identity is a cultural construct". CNN questions Bernie Sanders this week "What consequences should China face for its role in this global crisis?" We ventured out to the beach today. Everyone was giving everyone else a wide berth. We asked our kids "not to run straight towards people, especially old people" - "65" being, according to the news reader, the new "old". A group of teenagers 8-strong smother each other comparative to the 2-sword lengths separating everyone else. Our kids, who soak up viruses all the time & dish them out a la petri, *get it* like a game. We stayed on the beach for 3 hours because anything less would have meant more stewing at home, where more news & more mixed messages, opaque & facetious, awaited🖤

MARCH 23, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night