On Cory Arcangel

Arcangel likes to pull you in with a punch line before deeper meanings unfold. In their epigrammatic structure, Arcangel’s looped one-liners recall Samuel Beckett—“Try again. Fail again. Fail better”—with a little Borscht Belt thrown in. As with Beckett, or Bruce Nauman, his humor has an existential spark. In Arcangel’s modification of the classic Atari game Space Invaders, only a single, hapless invader remains. Arcangel has a Web site that automatically updates every time someone tweets the phrase “follow my other Twitter,” and a compulsively readable blog, Sorry I Haven’t Posted, that re-posts other people’s apologies for not blogging. Both projects have clever conceits, but over time they become bittersweet commentaries on aspiration and failure.

The New Yorker’s article on artist Cory Arcangel has emerged from the pay wall. [via The New Yorker]

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