Publisher: The MIT Press
Date Published: 2021
The real history of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves “The Birds.”
A great deal of uncertainty—and even some genuine confusion—surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or “Order of the Third Bird.” Sensational accounts of this “attentional cult” emphasize histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes—both to its ranks, and to its scholarship.