June 2010

The subject’s sex is again blurred out by the glimmering edge, so that even as the viewer’s power is refused, the object protects its autonomy, even, bizarrely and wonderfully, its privacy. In outsourcing the activity of authorship, to customs officials, no less, Eichorn reactivates the implications of this unconsummated desire. Mapplethorpe’s images become poignant, achieving, for a second time, a prescience of the looming AIDS epidemic.

In the January 1971 issue of ArtNews, Linda Nochlin published her now-canonical essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? She must not have been talking about photography.

As a financial wonk and Berkeley liberal, Lewis’ books have the rare quality of appealing to two audiences at once: bankers and people who consider reading financial journalism on par with a trip to the dentist. (I fall into the latter camp). In Liar’s Poker, passages about mortgage-backed bonds and credit default swaps—boiled down to their most digestible essentials—are interspersed with accounts of the self-described “Big Swinging Dicks” that ran the show, casting doubt on any theories that statistical failures were entirely to blame for looming financial troubles.

In anything further that he chooses to write about my text, I would like Afinogenov to at least acknowledge what a shoddy job he has done in summarizing what I actually wrote. He seems to obsess about issues of terminology, but hasn’t read my piece very carefully. Afinogenov imputes to me opinions that I do not have, and that I specifically reject in my text. He says I ignore things that I actually write about. He accuses me of being ahistorical, but even within the confines of the aphoristic style that I chose to present this material in there is more history than in his response. I would think that Harvard would expect a higher degree of intellectual rigor from its graduate students.