Posts Tagged “Uncategorized”

Going Going Gone | Donald Kuspit
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit9-15-99.asp
“The attempt to create beauty as perfectly as possible has led these artists to emphasize craft — not at the expense of vision, but as its instrument. Sol LeWitt once wrote that ‘When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art,’ but the New Old Masterism makes it clear that one can never learn one’s craft too well, and the result of doing so is not slick but uncanny. For superior craft intensifies sight so that it becomes insight, which is what occurs in highly crafted Old Master art. The New Old Masterism restores the idea of the work of art as a carefully considered and composed object rather than an improvised sketch, that is, as an integrated, organic whole rather than a partial expression.”Note: article date 15 Sept 1999

Queen Street’s New Old Masters | Timothy Comeau
http://www.blogto.com/arts/2005/06/queen_streets_new_old_masters/
“Dan Hughes’s show is just down the street from Mike Bayne’s, which just closed at Katherine Mulherin’s gallery, which I wrote about here and which mentioned Kuspit’s defense of superior craft ‘enhancing sight to produce insight’. I’m afraid that the only immediate insight I got from Dan Hughes’s show is that varnish makes paintings very shiny. (That and what follows after a couple of days reflection …). My own recent experiences with practicing the craft of painting, in relation to rendering and toward the achievements of the Old Masters is that craft alone clearly isn’t enough.”

Face to face with Freud | John Cornwell
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-531-1610665-531,00.html
“In the early days of his success half a century ago, Lucian Freud was a charismatic playboy, a lady-killer with an Alvis. He mixed as easily with Soho lowlife as with Mayfair toffs. Frail now, stick-thin, stooped, his face bloodless, his nose like a hawk’s bill, I see him shuffling up Holland Park Avenue to Lidgate, the bespoke butchers, to buy steaks for the whippet; woodcock, quail and snipe for his human sitters. In crumpled chinos and laceless trainers, a thin grey scarf around his collarless neck, there’s more than a hint of old Steptoe. Yet with an income estimated in 2003 as £12m a year, he is twice as rich as Robbie Williams, they say, and despite the geriatric grunginess, he can still mesmerise women old enough to be his granddaughters. At 79 he was dating a 27-year-old called Emily Bearn. His latest self-portrait (on show at the National Portrait Gallery) reveals a naked young woman, identified as one Alexandra Williams-Wynn, the 32-year-old daughter of a Welsh landowner and baronet. Her ankles are wrapped around his right leg; her left hand wanders, it seems, towards his fly; or is it his pocket?”Note: a very good read which nonetheless indulges in the stereotype of artist as womanising bad-boy

Modern, Postmodern, Altermodern? | Nicolas Bourriaud
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/aaanz/abstracts/nicolas_bourriaud
Note: not really a goodread, at least not yet, but here FYI, for he brings up the idea of creolization which I write about in the symposium review; this is an abstract to a paper he will be delivering in Australia this July

The Life Quixotic | Charles Foran
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/21/193210
“Miguel de Cervantes published the second part of Don Quixote in 1615, a decade after the first volume had granted the sixty-eight-year-old Spaniard unexpected late-career success, and a year after the appearance of the counterfeit Part II. A failed playwright, he appears to have dashed off both parts of his masterpiece in a hurry, anxious to counter his imitators and return to what he believed was his serious work. In his haste, Cervantes allowed his imagination to wander so far and wide from existing prose genres?the pastoral tale and chivalric romance being the most popular at the time?that he ended up in an entirely new form. Today we call that form the modern novel, and credit him with its invention. The author himself died in 1616, his hopes for immortality pinned to a pastoral adventure titled Persiles y Sigismunda. It is said to deserve its obscurity. […]That might be so. But it might also be the case that four centuries after the birth of the novel?a spectacular birth it was, too, like delivering an eighty-kilogram baby with a wicked sense of humour and a Mensa IQ?the majority of us hardly recognize the form innovated by Cervantes in the fictions we currently admire. The anniversary offers a chance to revisit the enchantments of Don Quixote and also to wonder about the state of enchantment in the literature of our own age.”

Da Vinci studio find thrills art lovers, experts | CTV.ca News Staff
http://tinyurl.com/8qcn3
“Art lovers, historians and experts around the world are marveling at news Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop may have been found in Florence. Italian researchers uncovered the room in a building just off the Piazza of the Santissima Annunziata in the central part of the celebrated city.”NOTE: with links to video reports

A Rational Quixote | Julian Evan
http://tinyurl.com/82gqs
“For 400 years – the first edition of the Quixote was distributed in Madrid in 1605 – his story has supplied the archetype of the bookish dreamer and the outermost comic landmark of our idealism. Yet Don Quixote’s achievement is surely greater than that. Without him, and without Cervantes’s own constant shifting between tradition and modernity, we might have remained for longer in a world of superstition and dogma. ‘Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity,’ Kant wrote in 1784, 180 years after the first publication of the Quixote. ‘The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence.'”

Don Quixote Symposium at U of T | Timothy Comeau
http://blogto.com/arts/2005/05/don_quixote_symposium_at_u_of_t/
“This isn’t going to be a great review, only because I went out of curiosity. I haven’t read Don Quixote nor am I tempted to anytime soon. But that’s not to say that the event sucked or anything – I think if I was a Don Quixote fan I would have really liked it, but not being one, I feel that I should just be up-front about that, and I write about my experience for what it’s worth. This review is also marred by the fact that having not read it, I’m in danger of not knowing what I’m talking about, so keep that in mind. So, accept these tokens of ignorance caveat lector. So why review it in the first place? Because I like that word – ‘re-view’. Because you missed it, and I was there, I can try to fill you in, paint a picture enabling you to ‘re-view’ it.”

Sons and Uniforms | Ed Deary via Chris Lloyd
http://nobilliesplease.blogspot.com/
“I cannot imagine coming of age now. When I was a child the world was still stable. He was born in the shadow of Y2K – we were told that the world may even stop – and when 2000 came to Australia and we could see the live broadcast from the beaches – seeing the sun rise – I felt such a great sense of release – that the world would not stop – I tried to hide this, I remember – because Willow caught me there with a tear in my eye and she laughed at me. Well then came 911, and the litany of what has followed. These are things that we all shared – and I suppose that, in sharing them, it made them bearable.”
I’ve linked to the blog rather than the entry as all the entries are on that one page.

Guest Posting on Dear PM | Ed Deary via Chris Lloyd
http://tinyurl.com/cmnxf
“You know this sponsorship thing is sooo stupid – I mean shit how much money are we talking, a thousand here a few hundred thousand there – what’s the big freaking deal? Who doesn’t think that the government doesn’t grease wheels (nobody)? I think Stephen Harper looks like a big jerk. I would never vote for him after the stuff that he’s pulled. Maybe I don’t get it – but I don’t think that I’m in the minority – just ask some people the next time you go for your double americano from starbucks if they give a rats ass that you are sorta responsible for the misappropriation of funds run through an ad company – no, I don’t think anybody really cares. Cause, like I said, don’t people think that your doing that anyway? And that big jerk Harper, running with it like that. What a total jerk. Canada is important to me, in the morning I wake up and think that god I’m in Canada and not New York City with that old girlfriend of mine that kicked me out. I’m still mad at her cause she dumped me 4 times.”

‘The Animated Bride at Understanding Duchamp’ | Andrew Stafford
http://www.understandingduchamp.com/
An interactive Flash site detailing Duchamp’s body of work. Scroll over to 1923 to see the animated The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor’s, Even, with an explanation according to Duchamp’s notes.

Mitochondria | John Kyrk
http://www.johnkyrk.com/mitochondrion.html
A flash animation explaining the function of cellular mitochondria. More animations are available via the menu at johnkyrk.com

And now, some Ann Coulter related stuff ….
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Open Letter to Anyone Who Gives a Shit About Justice | Ajai Raj
http://www.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/gennie.pl?Rant+225
“I’m writing this in response to the spectacle that occurred in the LBJ Library on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005, when Ann Coulter, a diabolical, ignorant, but nevertheless charismatic right-wing pundit, came to speak at the University of Texas at Austin. […] The title of the Daily Texan front-page story covering Ms. Coulter’s speech was ‘Arrest Made at Coulter Speech.’ You could also have caught it on CBS or in the Austin-American Statesman. The general idea is that some jackass made a scene, and Ann Coulter was also there. I am Ajai Raj, and I am a jackass.”

I Fucked Ann Coulter in the Ass, Hard | Bachem Macuno
http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com/
More FYI than a goodread, it’s become famous in the past couple of weeks, with 211 comments

Pornography in Clay | Matthias Schulz
http://tinyurl.com/948et
“According to Staeuble, the fragments show that the man was standing with his pelvis at a slight angle. The woman in front of him was bent forward, almost at a 90-degree angle. Another indication that the two figures belong together is the fact that they are both made to the same scale — both figures were originally just under 30 centimeters (11.7 inches) tall. The only depictions of sexual activity known until now were Greek paintings, but they were created more than 4,000 years later. Given this enormous difference in time, the Saxony find has created some confusion. Some believe it was a toy. Archäo, a professional journal, speculates that it may have been ‘chic’ to display these types of sculptures in the ‘houses of the first farmers between the Saale and Elbe rivers.’ Researchers speculate that the figure could also be evidence of a ‘fertility cult’ — a theory that sounds as straightforward as it is vague.”

The Porn Myth | Naomi Wolf
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/index.html
“Porn is, as David Amsden says, the ‘wallpaper’ of our lives now. So was she [Dworkin] right or wrong? She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic. […]But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy.’ Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention. “

…meaning, it’s viewable at the Information Clearing House Link below, streamed as a Real Media file embedded in the page (although I recommend you right/control-click on it to play in Real Player). Information Clearinghouse has also provided transcripts of the episodes. – Timothy
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The Power of Nightmares | Adam Curtis
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1037.htm
NOTE: Part I, with links to Part II and III, with transcripts and Real Video presentation

Interview with Adam Curtis | CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/powerofnightmares/interview.html
“VIEWER: Are you saying that there is no threat?
DIRECTOR ADAM CURTIS: No, the series did not say this. It was very clear in arguing that although there is a serious threat of terrorism from some radical Islamists, the nightmare vision of a uniquely powerful hidden organization waiting to strike our societies is an illusion. As the films showed, wherever one looks for this ‘al-Qaeda’ organization – from the mountains of Afghanistan to the ‘sleeper cells’ in America – the British and Americans are pursuing a fantasy. The bombs in Madrid and Bali showed clearly the seriousness of the threat – but they are not evidence of a new and overwhelming threat unlike any we have experienced before. And above all they do not – in the words of the British government – ‘threaten the life of the nation’. That is simply untrue. “

Generation Y embraces choice, redefines religion | Cheryl Wetzstein
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050412-121457-4149r.htm
“‘Generation Y,’ born between 1980 and 2000, is ‘bringing [media] industries to their knees’ by embracing IPod, TiVo and other technologies that allow unprecedented consumer choice, said Roger Bennett, co-founder of Reboot, a Jewish group that is examining generational issues. […] Reboot’s study, ‘OMG! How Generation Y is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era,’ was released yesterday in a press conference at the Brookings Institution. The study is based on a survey last year of 1,385 persons ages 18 to 25. To add depth, samples of black, Muslim, Jewish, Asian and Hispanic youths were included, said Anna Greenberg, vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a firm known for its work with liberal political groups. […]The Reboot study found that 23 percent of Generation Y, like Generation X, do not identify with a religious denomination or don’t believe in God. This is more than twice the number of nonbelievers among baby boomers, or those born between 1946 and 1965, Ms. Greenberg noted. Generation X was born between 1966 and 1979. […]The Reboot survey further found that Generation Y was ‘more liberal and progressive’ than older generations, both in political leanings and on social issues such as homosexual ‘marriage’ and immigration. Fifty-four percent of voters younger than 30 voted for Sen. John Kerry last year — the only age group the Democratic presidential candidate carried, the study noted.”

America, Fuck Yeah!
http://tinyurl.com/44mt4
NOTE: A remix of this, Quicktime Mov, 5.6Mb