Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist writer, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry, and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive and IT executive, he’s found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could have made up.
He has a B.A. from St. Lawrence University, and a graduate degree from Loyola. He’s studied with Sharon Mesmer, Sidney Offit, Josh Gaylord and Justus Rosenberg in The New School’s writing program, and since 2009, in Pulitzer Prize winner Phil Schultz’s Writers Studio. In 2010 he was selected to attend the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore at the masters level, where he studied with Rick Moody. Somewhere along the way he learned to write about himself in the third person.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, one filled with ideas re-emerging as vastly powerful things, even in the simple acts of everyday life, and the creation of long periodic sentences to explain it all.
Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
The Whitney Biennial – The End In Sight?
Spending Friday at the Whitney Museum of Art’s Biennial was like spending an afternoon watching YouTube, except the Whitney’s installations were of a lower production quality and were vastly less meaningful — even when shouting their relevance at full volume. Room after room showed video after video in the show billed as the art world’s statement of what’s happening now, a statement, the Whitney will tell you, it has been making for over 75 years.
But this version of the Beinnial’s statement is about …