Amidst invitations to "become a fan of pizza" and "join the cause for world peace" something interesting showed up in Facebook yesterday: Lisson Gallery's crossword ad for Ryan Gander's upcoming show "You walk into a space, any space" [bottom right].  I would have preferred an all-art crossword in this context, but the form was enough to start free-associating to Paulina Olowska's installation at the Pinakothek Der Moderne in Munich [bottom left] and our own 2009 crossword project, a study in public, text-based relational aesthetics.

Could it be the we're all flushed with centenary fever for the crossword, a uniquely modern mass-culutral interactive text-art form? First called a "word-cross" (like a butterfly was first a "flutterby"), this grid-regulated puzzle made its debut in mass-distributed form, specifically the "Fun" section of the December 1913 edition of New York World.  This was, of course the very year that New York got its first taste for another modern artform, namely Dada, at the Armory Show. To enliven the historical moment a bit more, let's not forget that not two years earlier, Picasso brought the newspaper into the domain of art with his papier collé pieces like Glass and Bottle of Suze.  

The crossword puzzle was born without objecthood, but unlike so much mass-mediated material, it's been hitherto relatively absent as Pop art content, seemingly because it is too culturally multi-valenced: Speaking Greenbergian, crosswords are kitsch in form, but in content, they are too high-brow to be easily accessed for reconfiguration, i.e. ask yourself in earnest what day you can get to; controlling meaning is difficult in such situations of elusiveness, though the present flurry of attempts to involve the crossword in the fine arts seems to suggest some larger attempt at a reconciliation of cultural forms.