Lou Reed got Kanye West's Yeezus absolutely right. "No one's near doing what he's doing,” Reed wrote in a review just a few weeks before he died. “It's not even the same planet ... He keeps unbalancing you." The unbalancing act went full-tilt last week, when West released the video for “Bound 2.” Instantaneously, the Internet did what the Internet does: hate. The video was ridiculed as clueless kitsch. But I dig it, and I think it represents a part of a collective cultural fracturing, via an idiom that I call the New Uncanny. When performers like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, and, yes, Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic try so hard to showcase and communicate how sincere they are, instead they reveal how out-of-touch they are — from each other, from themselves, from us. These are not just famous performers; they are performers of fame. In their grandiose sincerity, their attempt to keep it real (West says his "passion is for humanity" and that his art is totally about "beauty, truth, awesomeness"), these stars become alien things, automata, odd gods before our eyes. By some bizarre alchemy, they then toggle back into demented sincerity while simultaneously remaining alien, other, apart. They become psychological quantum particles, in two states at once. Sincerity and fame combine, float free of common rules. "Bound 2" represents a psychological fissure whereby stars gives us exactly what we ask of them — a glimpse into their inner selves — and then are shunned and mocked for it. They're sacred cows and sacrificial lambs at the same time. Just as the Rodney King video included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, “Bound 2” should be in the upcoming one, representing a bend of cultural nature. Last week, I suggested this on my Facebook page, and watched my words burned before me, the way disco records were in the seventies. Had I once again been blinded by fame's death-ray of idolatry, idiocy, and primitive force? (See my dancing with Jay Z.) Is this video anything? Is Kanye doing what he says he's doing, "clearing a path for people to dream properly," or has he gone off the demented deep end? Had I followed him?

Human Beings Enter the Uncanny Valley Between 6 and 12 Years of Age

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.

New findings published in PNAS this September are putting some long-overdue experimental rigor behind the uncanny valley. Last spring at Princeton’