UNVANQUISHED
Amin Alsaden on Iraq’s art under two decades of occupation
THE LOSER THING
From the archive: Rhonda Lieberman on the art of failure
Village Vanguard
The insurgent humanism of Lorraine Hansberry’s last play
Sasha Stiles
Transcending digital dualism through networked poetry
CLOSE -UP: AT FIRST LIGHT
Murtaza Vali on Hrair Sarkissian’s Execution Squares, 2008
FIERCE DETACHMENTS
Tiana Reid on Tina Post’s Deadpan
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PRINT September 1992
THE LOSER THING
Rhonda Lieberman
“While no one is making masterpieces anymore, no one is trying to make them either,” Rhonda Lieberman remarked in her iconic 1992 essay “The Loser Thing.” Appearing in that year’s September issue—which launched Jack Bankowsky’s eleven-year editorship of the magazine—the piece brilliantly explicates the aesthetics of abjection, slackerism, and self-abasement that were then efflorescing into a kind of fin-de-siècle flop era, one in which artists began “exploring the richness of student-loan debt, credit-card debt, masturbation, bloated ambition, and enforced downward mobility as the substantive