Some may view this as another sign of the
end of print culture and the triumph of the digital revolution.
The project highlights the experimental ethos of artist book production as alternatives to gallery exhibitions during that period, as well as radical new approaches to the
circulation of print culture through mass media.
It is this shift in how truth is perceived and appropriated that is one of the factors creating resistance to electronic culture by theologians and clergy, whose understanding of faith has been strongly shaped by the characteristics and
requirements of print culture in which they were educated and by virtue of which they hold status and power.
This is a style of communication that is «messy» for those bred with the clean «logical»
world of print culture's abstracted ideas.
The
result of the print culture church adopting the expectation that all Christians would agree to exactly the same doctrine resulted in the shattering of Christian fellowship and some bloodshed.
Here the curators, Jennifer Tonkovich and Marco Simone Bolzoni, trace the influence of the court, the
birth of a print culture, and a budding market in collectors (like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe more than a century later).
Weber notes an uptick in «obsessive collecting» in this category that is informed by «a consciousness that certain
aspects of print culture are vanishing.»
The exhibition draws from both archival collections and contemporary practices, focusing on how these artists reuse the
pieces of print culture for worldmaking projects ranging from the era of gay liberation to the present.
In Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the
End of Print Culture, published ten years ago, Dana Gioia wrote that «as long as humanity faces mortality and uses language to describe its existence, poetry will remain one of its essential spiritual resources....