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Conversation in the MoMA Library

One of my reasons to come to New York was “to firsthand experience new developments in print media”, as I put it in my coverletter to study at The New School. Today I had such an experience while attending an interesting event, called “A Conversation on Independent Publishing as Practice” in the MoMA Library reading room.

The event, hosted by an online-based organization called Paperweight, was a conversation on independent artist publishing in the contemporary era by a panel of people from the field. Interesting was the comment of someone within the panel who said that (I paraphrase) while the commercial print industry is in a crisis the artist publishing scene is flourishing.

Paperweight fits into this image I have of New York’s current independent publishing scene (just like The New Inquiry and Triple Canopy for example) of twenty-somethings of the “over-educated yet underemployed” generation who gather in collectives, are influenced by online publications and have an aversion of commercial print media.

“It’s easy to interpret…

“It’s easy to interpret what happened thirty years ago, but things get harder when we talk about eight, five, three years ago – and talking about why things are relevant while they’re still happening is trickier still. One of the reasons for this is that we lack the vocabulary to communicate precisely what we’re observing. When a cultural phenomenon blossoms in real time, people tend to have trouble simply talking about it, because the words that accurately define what they’re witnessing don’t really exist yet.”

Tim Small, “The Resurgence of R&B” in Kaleidoscope Magazine, issue 14, p. 26, 2012.