CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/13/2012

Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine

Featured image, a 1983 photograph of Dennis Mann riding “Soldier” in Cave Creek, Arizona, is reproduced from Mary Walling Blackburn's essay, "The Bull Rider and the Ballerina," re-published in Cabinet Magazine's new and highly recommended anthology of the most interesting successes and instructive failures published in the first 40 issues of the magazine. One of our top-selling holiday gift books this season, Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine overflows with fascinating material, as evoked by an introductory quote by Michel Foucault, from The Masked Philospher: "Curiosity is a new vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes “concern”; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential."