the new york times wants me to get cultured...and they want me to do it in a fashionable and elegant way...there should be no stinting on consumption ...we're talking culture here in a way only the times can present it...amidst the glossy pages committed to articles about haute couture and the simply marvelously creative works of interior designers and an artist creating an installation by printing out all the images uploaded to Flickr in a twenty-four hour period and dumping them on the floor for people to rummage through...ostensibly a work about "outsourced" memory but really about human voyeurism...and a longish article on kanye west because he would seem to have far more important things to say than the rest of us ( because he has more money? it why people read about fucking sports stars...more goddamned voyeurism...life is thick with it ) are the things the magazine is really about...fifty four full page color ads and five black and white for a total of $5,847,000 in advertising revenue for that section alone...they have surely confused culture with fine arts...but the message is clear anyway...if you can't make culture you can buy culture and it is the moneyed that have the important things to say...it's too late for the times not to be an elitist newspaper but when it comes to putting things in perspective it is unbeatable.
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