Hello Thursday!

Another week, another Thursday. I hope you’ve all managed to stay safe from the Cyclospora outbreak — I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have “poop lettuce” on my 2026 bingo card! And it doesn’t help matters that we know we can’t necessarily trust what the government tells us about it.

Cities are a form of living history

In Kelly Ma’s review of Yuko Mohri’s show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (more on this below) in the Summer 2026 ArtForum, I was particularly struck by this bit:

Those who call New York home are accustomed to its many design flaws and outdated technologies, be they drippy scaffolds, subway delays, or curbside garbage piles. In a sense, we effectively life in the nineteenth century, when the city’s planning took place.

I would agree that cities are in many ways a sort of living time capsule of the time in which they were built — or in the cases of cities which have undergone disasters either natural (San Francisco, New Orleans) or manmade (Tokyo, Berlin) rebuilt — but I also think it’s very New Yorkerly of Ma to claim as unique to New York a characteristic that I would argue belongs to every city. (I love New York, but ISTG New Yorkers act like their heads are gonna explode if someone doesn’t tell them how awesome their city is every five minutes.) 

Cities are built in a particular time and place, to meet the needs of the people of that time and place, using the technology available in that time and place. Over time, the needs of the people in that place chance, and the technologies available to them change, but there are never sufficient resources — whether in money, time, or political will — to take the city down and rebuild it to suit the new status quo. Instead, efforts are made to modernize the city as possible, making whatever chances must be done, in whatever ways they can be done with the least disruption. The end result is that one is living in a city with serial layers of technology grafted on top of each other — a superficial modern city, but beneath that a city of the time of its (re)building. (It’s much like houses — as much as I sometimes fantasize about tearing down my 1946 house and building a fully modern house in its place, it’s just not in the cards, so I make sure the wiring, plumbing, and HVAC are up to 21st-century standards, while underneath it all living in a 1940s house.) 

Art I’d like to see, but not so much to live with

Yuko Mohri’s sculptures are fascinating. Even though there’s really no substitute for seeing the work, Kelly Ma’s description of “Moré Moré (Leaky): Falling Water Given” (2015) gives a good impression:

The work is comprised of a triptych of rectangular wooden frames . . . draped with vessels and tubing that looked like a tangle of inventive IV drips. The small pumps, like hearts, pulsed to circulate water through imaginative conduits like green plastic apples atop a basic (as if ready for bobbin) and a smiley-face “Thank You” bag, both of which tied the installation to New York via instantly recognizable icons of the city. A drum, a cymbal, and a triangle nodded to Duchamp’s drumlike chocolate grinder, with the jittery flow triggering stutters of taps and dings by a bell, a mini bottle brush, and a hook.

The whole thing is a delightfully quirky Rube Goldberg machine of a sculpture, and if I encountered it in a museum or gallery, I’d probably spend such a length of time watching it that whoever I was with would either start pressing me to move on or else move on by themselves and leave me behind. (This is part of why I enjoy going to museums by myself.) But I can’t imagine living with this sculpture in my house — besides the fact that it makes noise, there’s the fact that it features constantly moving water, which would make me nervous. 

I think there are a lot of artworks like this: Seeing Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (consisting of a tiger shark preserved in formalin in a glass display case) in a museum would be one thing. Living with it in one’s house would be something else altogether. Besides the “OMG huge dead shark!” factor, there’s also the fact that it would take up 7 x 17 feet of floor space — a nontrivial amount of real estate in most houses/apartments. Thinking back to my writing about long-duration performance works in Thursday #4, I think it would be interesting for someone to make a work about their experiences living with “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” for a year — I wouldn’t want to do it, but I’d be interested in the result if somebody else did it.

I think this is a part of the role of museums — providing us with a site to encounter works of art that are unsuitable for living with.

Things to check out online

• Let’s Talk About the Hardware Reckoning — AI companies are buying massive amounts of computer hardware to build their date centers, driving up the cost of hardware for everyone. The author of this article tells of buying a 4 TB SSD hard drive in October 2025 for $300, and then looking at the same hard driving in July 2026 when writing this article and finding that in the interval it had gone up to almost $900. Besides driving up computer prices for consumers and for other businesses, this is also driving up prices for phones, gaming consoles, cars, and anything else that uses computer technology (which is pretty much everything now). Seriously, the AI “industry” can’t die soon enough to suit me.

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• ArtForum, Summer 2026 — One of the highlights of this issue was Katy Siegel’s essay “Populism and Pluralism: On the lessons of the 1976 Bicentennial.” I’ve never really done much reading on the Bicentennial, and given how young I was at the time, my memories are more of the “Bicentennial Era” than of the Bicentennial proper, and are very incomplete and impressionistic. This essay let me fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge and has pushed me toward reading Siegel’s book (cowritten with Elise Armani), What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era. Seigel uses the contrasting cases of the Bicentennial and the Sesquicentennial celebrations to show how American society, and more particularly its relationship to art, has changed in the intervening 50 years, and to help show possible paths forward for arts institutions from this point. I was particularly taken by the essay’s final sentence:

  If there is a lesson here, it is rooted firmly in what we have lost: True cultural pluralism depends on the material conditions — public investment, a tolerable economy, and political activism — that once made it possible for so many people to participate in creating a societal culture.

  Obviously it won’t be easy, but we’ve got to find a way to get those things back again.

I’ve continued reading

• Blue Rose: The AGE Role-Playing Game of Romantic Fantasy 

• Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

• Make: #97 — One nice thing about the project articles in Make: is that they’re up-front about the difficulty of the projects and also the amount of time and money you’d be sinking in the project, so you know at the the start of the article whether this is a project you’re reading with aspirations to make someday or a project that you’re reading strictly for the vicarious experience. I also like the fact that they number the issues, rather than assigning them a publication date. While the information is early issues of Make: does gradually become outdated, it’s not such as rapid process as to require precise time-stamping. (Also, the projects in the early issues are still valuable, either as something you can update to be made with new technology or as something you can build if you still have some of the older technology lying around.) 

and I’ve started reading

• Minnesota Monthly, July/August 2026

• Bike Minnesota 2026 (from Minnesota Monthly)

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 20 (Yuto Tsukuda)

• In the Embrace of Dragons (Lyonne Riley) — I got an ARC of this after encountering the author on Threads. I’m a couple of chapters in, so I don’t know everything that I’m in for, but so I know that the dragons are roughly human-sized and don’t have wings, and that (based on having read previous books from this author) I should expect some extremely spicy monster/human sex scenes before this is over (which will no doubt be facilitated by the dragons being human-sized and wingless). 

• Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000 (Barry Walters) — I’d been waiting a couple of months to get this from the library after reading a review of it in BookPage, and I just got to check it out. I’ve read the introduction, which establishes the authors credentials on the subjects (gay male, music critic at The Village Voice and Rolling Stone among other places), but haven’t gotten into the book proper yet. 

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason