Rosemary Goes to the Mall Dot Com

Rob Walker has a good gig. He writes about consumer culture for TNYT Magazine. This week’s installment looks at Rosemary Williams, an artist and an assistant professor of new media at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.

Williams finds shopping anxiety-laden, which makes her choice to pursue “The Wall of the Mall” an act of bravery as well as an act of art, for she had to make recurrent trips to the Mall of America to create her work.
Her choice to “look critically at the ways in which shopping dominates our mental and physical landscapes” eventually took sculpted form (see photo above). She continues the theme in an audio series available from her site, Rosemary Goes to the Mall. In episode 16, Rosemary discovers the unadulterated joys of pure oxygen at Oxynate, an oxygen bar on the 3rd floor of the Mall. High on oxygen, she then drops $580 on a Magellan Portable Auto Navigation System at Radio Shack.
Good stuff.