Last week, I witnessed a birth. I know that it happened at 11:59 am on February 21st, 2012, that her grandmother made her a pink elephant blanket, and that she arrived an “overly punctual” three days ahead of schedule. I know this because she was tagged in seventy-three photos on Facebook; images that linked to her very own profile, created by her parents. Her birth[…..]

There is always someone who is offended by every biennial. They are inherently two-headed beasts, with the introspective head judging the strengths and weaknesses of a portion of the art world, while the extroverted head optimistically presents a narrative, declaring why the included artists are notable. For this year’s DeCordova Biennial, curators Dina Deitsch and Abigail Ross Goodman followed tradition by programming a regional Biennial[…..]

In a recent BBC documentary on J Dilla, the deceased beatmaker’s family and fellow industry folk recount the seminal producer’s style, marked most notably by a counter-quantizing of his drum machine: a drunken mechanization, a meeting point of analog practices (the mythic process of searching through crates of records) and digitization that concurrently sounded ill-programmed (off-beat), yet intentional and on-point. This is man-made modernism, in[…..]