Shhh!: 20 Artists on Changes in Culture & Democracy, Pasadena Hastings Branch Library
opening reception September 9, 2018, 1:30-4:30 pm
Includes my handmade book, Concepts in Science: A Beginning Vocabulary for the Science of a Mid-Life Crisis
Woody O’ Toole Untitled 44”x 16”x10
PRESS RELEASE
“Shhh!”
September 9-September 30, 2018
Opening September 9th, 1:30-4:30 PM
All of our political, social and cultural institutions are under pressure to change, to be replaced, or to disappear. Libraries are no exception. Budgets are being cut. Hi-tech corporations would like to privatize them. Hard cover books are slowly but surely being replaced with ebooks.
Librarians, once the secular high priests and priestesses who treated books as sacred, have been demoted and forced to throw books in their dumpsters.
For the month of September on display at the Pasadena Hastings Branch Library, the JJU collective has curated over 30 artists, some internationally known, who will explore the consequences of books as being obsolete, reduced to base material, no different than clay. What does it mean for our culture that what was once taboo is now commonplace? What does it mean if the library is the last public space not dominated by commercial exchange?
What does this mean for democracy if there is no longer an informed citizenry?
What does it mean for critical thinking? Will people cease to know their own history?
What does it mean for the creation and evaluation of new ideas and knowledge production?
As well, what does it mean for aesthetic evaluation uninfluenced by the biases solely of the commercial market place?
What will the library look like when there are no books? What will it be for? What taboos and sense of the sacred will replace it, if any?
Will the individual have anything to say about their own subject formation, the formation of their individuality or the formation of their own consciousness?
Merrill Feitell 
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