To hide or dissemble Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King secretsgovernment
We infantilize ourselves Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don't understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King societygovernmentpoliticsmoralitycivics
To absorb it or build your own Robert Smithson and other so-called land artists simply disengaged from architecture, placing their works in America's open landscape, leaving behind the museums and galleries Smithson referred to as "tombs". A new "expanded field" allowed artists to contextualize their work beyond the institutional frame of the museum or the commercial structure of a gallery. Richard Serra, who also began to move outdoors, at times chose to "attack" architecture, creating structures that disrupted or overwhelmed the buildings around them. The artists of the Light and Space movement took another tack. Rather than fight or flee the architecture, they explored and manipulated it, approaching architecture as a kind of found object, creating a series of rooms that incorporated architecture and architectural structures directly into their art. Bruce Nauman summarized it well: "When you work in a gallery or museum, the architecture is a given. If you wanted to have a show, you didn't have a choice, except to deal with it. You had to find a way to either absorb architecture into the piece of build your own." Michael Auping, Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Light and Space Conditional art architecture