Arts & Cultural Analysis Archives - Katherine Oktober Matthews

No News Is Good News

July 12, 2018
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“Do you want to go to World Press Photo and feel bad about everything?” TheWorld Press Photo exhibit, featuring the greatest hits of misery, is no exception to the rule that no news is good news.
(Riding the Dragon, 2018)

The Overview Effect

December 24, 2017
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"Rather like the fish who doesn’t realise he’s swimming in water, our relationship with our own terrain is easy to not perceive due to its ubiquity."
(GUP Magazine, 2017)

Nothing Is Forever Except Everything

October 9, 2017
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"We are obsessed with all that is fleeting, and our chosen means of showing this appreciation is through capture."
(GUP Magazine, 2017)

Come Hither: A Reframed Means of Seduction

May 15, 2016
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“In one sense, it’s business as usual: a man has photographed a young girl provocatively. In another sense, [Playboy] may have come to recognize that, in modern times, perhaps the most desirable woman is one who is in control over her own image.”
(GUP Magazine, 2016)

Pain Isn’t Pretty

September 29, 2015
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“If you sit with the discomfort long enough, it can transform with effort into something else. For example, ecstasy. For example, liberation. For me, what my body brews when percolating over these particular images long enough is transcendence of self.”
(GUP Magazine, 2015)

Picture or It Didn’t Happen

August 17, 2015
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“As uncountable photos of bikinis and cocktails pass by my social networking streams in summer – trophy heads mounted on the wall celebrating the ‘best party ever’, souvenirs marking the sacrifices made at the altar of YOLO – I can’t help but wonder, is there anybody out there still buying into all this?”
(GUP Magazine, 2015)

Do Drones Dream of Simulated Celebrities?

June 2, 2015
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"Perhaps an integral part of human vision is the power of, and inclination towards, deception."
(GUP Magazine, 2015)

Selfie-Obsession

December 24, 2013
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"What I find interesting is all the attention that various organized media are heaping towards selfies, repeating ad nauseam the fact that the Oxford dictionary named ‘selfie’ their word of the year. Who gives a shit?"
(GUP Magazine, 2013)

Horizon Destination

December 4, 2013
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“This wanting, this hole in the soul of our being, is one of the great defining features of the human condition. And images capitalise on it, exacerbate it. They feed us with more desires before we even know we’ve consumed them.”
(GUP Magazine, 2013)

Pause Transition

November 24, 2012
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"Pre-packaged with the camera’s ability to freeze life mid-sentence is also our implicit allowance to sacrifice the entirety of the experience to its souvenir."
(GUP Magazine, 2012)