CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/29/2013

Cabinet on Trial: A Magazine of No Qualities?

On Wednesday, January 30, Cabinet Magazine launches its new 10-year anthology, Curiosity and Method, at the New York Public Library with a courtroom-drama-style mock-trial/debate.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013, 6 - 8 p.m.
New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building,
South Court Auditorium
FREE - Auditorium doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Featured image is reproduced from the "Library" entry in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine.

For more than a decade, Cabinet has published essays and artist projects that have ranged far and wide in topic and tone. To some, this breadth of interests suggests an ethically grounded culture of curiosity about the world. For others, this eclecticism is merely the symptom of an undisciplined dilettantism that fails to engage the crucial issues of today. It is time for a reckoning! In connection with the launch of Cabinet's new anthology, those responsible for the publication will be called to the dock to answer for their activities. Inspired by Dada mock trials, this event brings together a formidable cast of litigators and judges in a format mixing serious debate with courtroom drama.

Since its launch in late 2000, the art and culture quarterly Cabinet has aimed to encourage a new culture of curiosity, one that forms the basis both for an ethical engagement with the world as it is and for imagining how it might be otherwise. The publication’s new anthology, Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine, gathers some of the most interesting successes, and a few instructive failures, published in its first forty issues. Taking the form of an illustrated encyclopedia, the idiosyncratic entries include Addiction, Animal Architecture, Goalkeeping, Micronation, Otolith, Sandal,Worlding, and Zoosemiotics. The book also features seven new essays on keywords that have been important in framing the project of the magazine, including Collecting (Barbara Benedict), Attention (Lorraine Daston), The Everyday (Jeff Dolven), Pranks (Anthony Grafton), Listening (Daniel Rosenberg), Curiosity (Justin E. H. Smith), and Pleasure (Marina Warner).

The participants in this event are: Julieta Aranda, Claire Bishop, D. Graham Burnett, Nick Denton, Natalie de Souza, Hal Foster, Ben Kafka, Frederick Kaufman, David Levine, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Sina Najafi, George Prochnik, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Lytle Shaw, Mary Walling Blackburn, and Ben Wizner. This event is organized in collaboration with Arezoo Moseni.

For more information, visit the NYPL Events Page