Mia You lives in the Netherlands and teaches at the Universiteit Utrecht and the Sandberg Institute. She is the author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote, 2007), and her criticism has appeared in Artforum, the Boston Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” ...