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First Word Art / Last Word Art

naimark.net · 823 words · saved by 2 readers

Art means many things to many people, but I know of one cut that neatly divides the art world in two, and ultimately relates to other worlds such as business. One might call this "first word art" and "last word art." At least that’s how I first heard it. As a grad student long ago, I discovered a resourceful and eccentric engineer named Brad squirreled away in MIT’s famous Building 20, a funky wood-frame structure left over from World War Two. Building 20 housed the Radiation Lab, the Research Lab for Electronics, Noam Chompsky’s first Linguistics Lab, and the MIT Council for the Arts. Brad was the optics and electronics engineer for RLE’s Jerry Lettvin, and occupied a space filled to the ceiling with gear in various stages of assembly, and with gerbils. He looked like he was somewhere between 35 and 65 years old, and once told me he never got out of bed before noon. He seemed to enjoy helping over-stimulated wildcard types like me. One day, in an effort to calm me down, he asked what

First Word Art / Last Word Art michael naimark | home | projects | writings | biography | FineArtForum vol.15, issue 8, August 2001 First Word Art / Last Word Art Michael Naimark May 2001 Art means many things to many people, but I know of one cut that neatly divides the art world in two, and ultimately relates to other worlds such as business. One might call this "first word art" and "last word art." At least that’s how I first heard it. As a grad student long ago, I discovered a resourceful and eccentric engineer named Brad squirreled away in MIT’s famous Building 20, a funky wood-

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