Word: semioticians
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This premature event looks like a real retrospective but is not one. It covers the past seven years of Salle's work and is -- to pinch a term from Jean Baudrillard, the French semiotician whose phrases are parroted everywhere in the art world today and recur like pious ejaculations in the exhibition catalog -- a "simulacrum." In days of yore, the aim of a museum retrospective used to be clear. It was to sum up a distinguished career, presenting the evidence of a long life's work. For a major museum to give a 34-year-old artist a retrospective would...
Umberto Eco's novel was a deliciously complex academician's joke: a multiple- murder mystery set in the Middle Ages and starring a Sherlockian monk with the mind-set of a modern semiotician. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud's pale "palimpsest" of the novel opts instead for rolling around in the muck, blood and superstitions of primitive societies -- a sort of Quest for Friar. Annaud goes about his task with the self-satisfied air of an anthropology professor shocking the freshmen out of their complacency. His reversal of the tale's priorities dulls its point and dims the mature, intelligent presence...
...semiotician's practiced eye, society's every phenomenon and event is a text inviting interpretation, an opportunity for writing oneself into the margins of the scene as reader-critic-author. Not that the margins are without their privileges. Blonsky observes--as no less than a cataclysm--the recent deaths of Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, whose posthumous presence in the collection reflects how the "death of the authors" has ironically inaugurated a backward-looking era for cultural literacy. At the same time, Blonsky's exclusive salon is also visited by still-vital voices such as Umberto...