Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence”—a tissue of appropriated passages from writers ranging from Sandra Day O’Connor to Mary Shelley—bears the subtitle “a plagiarism,” but it is an odd word to describe the piece. Reading through the assiduous inventory of references in Lethem’s closing “Key: I Is Another” (68), the reader recognizes that the Read More
In his “Editorial: The Value of Forgery,” Jonathan Hay argues that the presence of forgeries in the canon alongside putatively legitimate artworks calls into question the category of genuine on which the valuation of art depends. He argues that “the coherence of the modernist history of genuine art depends on elision of the feedback loop Read More
In 1999, the University of California, Berkeley began an ambitious distributed-computing project associated with its longstanding partnership with the SETI (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”) Institute of California. The joint SETI program had for years been a Sisyphean search for signs of intelligence in the radio waves bombarding the Earth from space. The program originally involved Read More