The Crisis of Intent

Victor Schrager's photographs currently on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York are dream-like and unsettling: richly saturated, they're a cross between the urban drama of a Hugh Ferris drawing and the sobering stillness of a Gerhard Richter painting. Are they landscapes? Portraits of cities? Architectural constructions? In truth, they're books, photographed at exaggerated angles and with dramatic lighting, densely rendered yet mysteriously stripped of any apparent meaning: after all, the titles are obscured, as are any typographic or, for that matter, communicative details. Of course, this is art photogaphy, subjective and impressionistic—hardly the terrain of communication design. Or is it? Somehow, despite their apparent obscurity, Schrager's images are anything but anonymous...

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You're Going to Hollywood, Baby

170,000 people in America think they have what it takes to be the next American Idol. And so they come, the talented and the talent-free, waiting in line for days on end in the hopes of securing one of the few prized spots in a competition that has has made Kelly and Clay household words. Young and oddly confident, they are blind to their deficiencies and impervious to the daunting odds stacked against them. To watch the AI auditions (which are currently being broadcast in the US on the Fox network during February, a "sweeps" month here in the US) is to be exposed to a curious epidemic: for while on the surface it's all about fame, it's also about the power wielded by the image, the luck of the draw, the seemingly insatiable quest for stardom that typifies modern ambition...

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