Inge Baxmann (ed.), Timon Beyes (ed.), Claus Pias (ed.)
Social Media—New Masses
Peter Krapp
Between the Madness and the Wisdom of Crowds
I’ve always been fascinated by globes, which is why I photographed this very special example in 2011, and the FB algorithm recently presented it to me again. It’s said to be the largest model of the world in the world. I discovered it in Corona Park in the New York district of Queens, the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. I went to the Queens Museum, whose creeper-covered wall is on the photograph’s right, mainly to see its model of New York. This impressive piece was commissioned by Robert Moses, director of the World’s Fair, in 1964. New York was supposed to look like an urbanist miracle, the most grandiose of 20th-century cities, the hub of the world.
Facebook fished the picture from the depths of its archives while I was thinking about the estate of an artist whose studio I had cleared out. It included a battered...
Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their way —ready to cross the bridge over the river Aire and engulf us all — in this winter of discontent, just beginning at this dead-of-night instant before midnight, North-Sea ice-particles already crackling in the air and the last summer long-over, the final moment of my seventeenth birthday, so we have to go, the devil is at our heels… And now we’re running at full-tilt through the centre of the city, across the square beneath the Purbeck-marble edifice of the Queen’s Hotel, down towards the dark arches under the railway tracks, the illuminated sky shaking, the air fissured with beating cacophony,...
I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.”
“No,” he said, “but I see you have string!”
“If this comes into motion—” I said, “you should use a rope.”
“Any poison ivy on that? ” he asked me, and I told him my rope had been in the barn peacefully for years.
He took a length of it to the bedside table. He had no concept for what wood could endure.
“Table must have broken when I lashed it onto the truck,” he said.
And, when he was moving the sewing machine, he let the cast iron wheels—bang, bang on the stair.
I had settled down to pack up the flamingo cookie jar, the cutlery, and the cookware, but stopped briefly, for how many times do you catch sudden sight of something heartfelt?
I saw our milk cows in their slow...