status

Obviously, I’m a sucker for stories that explore the subtle (and not-so) mechanisms of status display, especially when that display masquerades as a quest not for status but for the authentic. That kind of story is the meat-and-two-veg of the New York Times style section, and today’s is great.

My column for the mag this week is on status and art in the age of mass digitization — it riffs off a great piece that was in the wsj a while back about a neat thing a dude in Brooklyn is doing with a Sufjan Stevens tune he “won”. The broader context for this is what becomes of status signaling when so many signs of status rest on displaying “hard copies” of things that are easily digitizable. The solution, I argue, is a form of contrived scarce materiality or, alternatively,  ephemerality.