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After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social
Gregory Sholette
In the third chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick , the novel’s protagonist, Ishmael, enters the Spouter Inn in search of passage onto a whaling ship. He soon encounters an age-darkened oil painting in the entranceway and becomes perplexed. The canvas is so covered in scratches and smoky residue that it’s all but impossible to make sense of. Throwing open a window to gain more light, Ishmael attempts to describe what he sees:
what most puzzled and confounded you was a long,...