I had the privilege of seeing Anish Kapoor's work again today at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea.

I was swept away by "Here for Alba," a convex shape a little reminiscent of a Richard Serra except in fiberglass. Entering into the shape, you are surrounded by a curved, reflective fiberglass surface (see above). The result, as at some of the best works I saw at Haus der Kunst in January, confounds your ability to focus, undoing your sense of vision completely. Again, as in my previous post on the his work, Kapoor intrigues me because of his ability to directly effect bodily reality. I highly recommend the show, now at both the 24th and 21st street Gladstone Galleries (I have not seen the latter).   

If the creative class is now the dominant target for advocates of urban growth who argue that it is the engine of future economic growth, where does that leave the avant-garde? I'm such a Hegelian, but doesn't this mean we're done with the avant-garde once and for all? 

I'm in Munich for the DLD-Conference, moderating a panel with Richard Saul Wurman, Patrik Schumacher, Charles Renfro and Bjarke Ingels. Yesterday we had the opportunity to visit the Anish Kapoor show at the Haus der Kunst. The intensity of works like his 1999 Yellow struck me. I had never seen these in person before and I was utterly overwhelmed by the power of color. I don't mean this metaphorically, I mean this literally. The color was so intensely saturated that I couldn't look at it for too long and when I looked away, I was still left with the after-effects of the color. It was like staring into the sun. 

This led me to thinking how the Kapoor relates to Network Culture. I am spending more time expanding on the argument in that essay this year and, if I had earlier pointed to a fascination with reality, in the form of remix and documentary, as the defining factor of art under Network Culture, how could Kapoor's Yellow fit into my framework? 

First, to mark off certain works as "art", artists under Network Culture are more obsessed than ever with technique. The idea that "I could have done that" is implausible in the best work, such as the salon-painting sized photographs in the incredible "On the Beach" exhibit by Richard Misrach or Kapoor. But more than that, in Kapoor (and indeed, in the abstract photos of that exhibit by Misrach), there is another level of reality introduced: a bodily reality that harkens back to the days of Op Art.

Kapoor is not representing reality, he sets out to control it. You are no longer a viewer looking at a discreet work in this space. In Deleuzean terms, this is affect, beyond representation or subjectivity. Instead, the work's impact is total as it delivers a knock-out punch. Saturation, it seems, is reality.

Should you be at DLD while you are reading this, go see the show which ends tonight. I hope to make it back at 6.30 for a special walk-through. Drop me a line if you intend to see it.   

Artist Bas Jan Ader has always been important to AUDC. Thus, we noted with delight the Web site dedicated to his work, with an impressive video-driven interface (hard to imagine I would ever say that I like a video-driven Web interface, but that reminds me that I do need to revisit the interface to this site over winter break even as the lack of comment to my earlier post suggested that most of my dear readers do what I do and use RSS to browse blogs, avoiding visiting them entirely…).

Yes, I am a decade late with this post. Nevertheless, check out the work of Miltos Manetas, in particular his classic paintings of cables. Manetas's still lives of network culture underscore the physicality of our virtual world.

Slinkachu's Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project, is immediately captivating. But it also has a deeper resonance for me. Left out in the streets of London, these people are, quite literally doomed, unless brought home by a caring stranger. But this isn't a project about alienation to me as much as about self-sacrifice. The sacrifice these little people make leads me to think of our own desire to lose ourselves in the world (see my previous post about Jordan Crandall's showing). This makes me think a bit about Internet spammers too, blindly casting out their emails into a world that doesn't care, that ignores them as much as possible. I've noticed that over the course of the last year, more and more spam is utter nonsense, even verging on dadaist poetry. What drives us to lose ourselves in a larger whole?