Notebook on Cities and Culture

S2E11: Authenticity v. Utopia with Jonathon Keats


Listen Later

Colin Marshall sits down somewhere in between San Francisco's Chinatown, Nob Hill, and Russian Hill with conceptual artist, experimental philosopher, and writer Jonathon Keats, author of the upcoming book Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. They discuss his own role as, above all, a fake; his attempt to epigenetically clone such celebrities as Lady Gaga, Michael Phelps, and Barack Obama; Forged, forgery, pursuit of simulacra, and Wim Wenders' Notebook on Cities and Clothes; content's ongoing release from form, and how it sends out the concept of forgery even as it brings it back in; the enthusiastically forged paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Thomas Kinkade's massively replicated, "master highlighted" images; authenticity as it relates to spaghetti and meatballs; San Francisco's intriguing tension between the claims of its own authenticity and its vision of itself as an experimental utopia — or, in his words, its simultaneous tendencies toward the "incredibly smug" and "very insecure"; why Europeans love San Francisco, and whether that has anything to do with the city's ultimate derivation from their own; his thought experiments' usefulness as "curiosity amplifiers," generating larger questions than the ones they came from; the difference between doing experimental philosophy in San Francisco and in other countries, like Italy; and the exhilarating American freedom that also numbs.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Notebook on Cities and CultureBy Colin Marshall

  • 4.8
  • 4.8
  • 4.8
  • 4.8
  • 4.8

4.8

123 ratings


More shows like Notebook on Cities and Culture

View all
Bookworm by KCRW

Bookworm

579 Listeners

The Tony Kornheiser Show by This Show Stinks Productions, LLC

The Tony Kornheiser Show

10,421 Listeners

The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

113,121 Listeners

The Harper’s Podcast by Harper's Magazine

The Harper’s Podcast

135 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

16,525 Listeners