Paul Werner Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World.(Shorter notices)(Book review)

Paul Werner Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World. Prickly Paradigm Press, 76 pages, $10.

Books, books, everywhere, and not a word to read. So will go the epitaph of print media.

Prickly Paradigm Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, is one imprint, however, that intends to survive the mega-publisher dirge. Christened in 1993 in Cambridge under the name Prickly Pear, this small press endeavored to revive the culture of the pamphleteer. Matthew Engelke, who became Pear's co-editor in 1998, now oversees a catalogue of twenty-two titles. All are uniformly designed (soft cover, unattractive), opinionated (contrarian, often critical of the author's own field), and mercifully to-the-point (many well under 100 pages). Whether all of the "paradigms" are worthwhile is something else. I am still wrestling with two of the titles: Paradigm 13 by James Elkins (What Happened to Art Criticism?) and Paradigm 15 by Lindsay Waters (Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship).

Paradigm 8 by Donna Haraway (The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness) I'm planning to do without--apologies to Fido.

One of the latest "Paradigms" number 21 for those keeping score, has come by way of an ex-employee of the Guggenheim Museum and its infamous director. The name of Thomas Krens will not be unfamiliar to readers of this magazine. As the museum director of the 1990s, Krens franchised the Guggenheim brand to the highest international bidder and converted Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral jetty into a showroom for motorcyles, Armani clothes--whoever was willing to pay to play. In doing so he sent a shudder down the spine of anyone who regarded a museum as a safe house for culture and not an enterprise to be monetized and leveraged and gambled away.

In Museum, Inc., Paul Werner ...