Posts Tagged books

The Future of the Book

Posted by Adrian Toll on March 6th, 2009 - Read comments and add your own

Sven Birkets writes in The Atlantic about his fear that the Amazon Kindle will mean the end of the “deep” contextualisation that physical books give – libraries, book shops, history.

What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs. Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience. But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself. There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake. However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.

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Margarita Gluzberg – The Money Plot

Posted by LoveHowlMuse on April 30th, 2008 - Read comments and add your own

Coming With Her Husband - drawing by Margarita Gluzberg

Exhibition at Paradise Row, 2nd May – 8th June 2008

This is money… this is greed… this is power… This is… In the Blackout… the blue petals of Forget-me-nots sit, a pretty, ghostly, presence on the surface of the canvas and behind an image of… what? Of, this… of pure desire, ordered, corralled into regularised working hours, into electronic information – light no less – that fills the hungry, unblinking computer screens that chart, with ruthless relentlessness, the fluctuating prices of every commodity in the world… This is… Christmas Bollocks… particles of carbon…. an element born late in the history of the universe… born in the heart of a dying star… once coal black, now, compressed by weight, heat and time, they are transmuted into sharp, clear crystals that glint from behind a reflective screen of glass in which Christmas lights glitter in dark moments… This is… Leeds Market… Edwardian iron structures that soar upwards, conspiring to capture space from the sky in order to frame the daily rituals of production, display and consumption… This is… Coming with her Husband… two luxury crustaceans, two limpid, languid langoustines, replete with lemon wedges… temptingly thrust towards you…

Description property of Paradise Row…

‘If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.’

Chapter 1, ‘Shirley’, Charlotte Bronte

Paradise Row is proud to present The Money Plot a new exhibition by Russian born, London based artist Margarita Gluzberg. Comprising of paintings, drawings and a display of an eclectic range of books, printed matter and other ephemera, the show draws on autobiographical material from Gluzberg’s Soviet childhood, historical images of the English industrial North, the glittering contemporary shop facades of Bond Street and iconic pictures of trading floors, to piece together a bio-fictional history of consumption and its effects.

The works plot a serendipitous course through an imagined, personal history of the birth of modern consumer society. No clear thesis is presented, no blueprint for resistance drawn up, instead Gluzberg offers an empathic, response to the vast, vital energies of capital flows that animate our world.

The title of the show is taken from an appendix of Balzac’s novel La Cousine Bette. The work’s editors decided that in order to understand the complex network of the characters‚ relationships and intrigues in the book, the reader must be provided with a synopsis they termed The Money Plot – a breakdown of debts, financial dependencies and connections between the protagonists. The Money Plot lies behind all human relationships.

This is the Money Plot.