There's nothing better, after a long day of work in the sun, than beer and this movie:
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
You know you're getting old when swinging on a swing set suddenly makes you sick to your stomach... this happened to me today :(
Hey! Super sweet website!: http://www.owenmckenzie.com
I'm off to Wyoming at 6 in the a.m.
Summer is still the best I've had in years
Thank you
I needed this
COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?
MEET THE GUY WHO DOES
In Utah, a modern-day caveman has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day. People used to think he was crazy
By Christopher Ketcham
DANIEL SUELO LIVES IN A CAVE. UNLIKE THE average American—wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office—he isn't worried about the economic crisis. That's because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.
His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He's either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. Suelo's blog, which he maintains free at the Moab Public Library, suggests that he's both. "When I lived with money, I was always lacking," he writes. "Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."
On a warm day in early spring, I clamber along a set of red-rock cliffs to the mouth of his cave, where I find a note signed with a smiley face: CHRIS, FEEL FREE TO USE ANYTHING, EAT ANYTHING (NOTHING HERE IS MINE). From the outside, the place looks like a hollowed teardrop, about the size of an Amtrak bathroom, with enough space for a few pots that hang from the ceiling, a stove under a stone eave, big buckets full of beans and rice, a bed of blankets in the dirt, and not much else. Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it.
Night falls, the stars wink, and after an hour, Suelo tramps up the cliff, mimicking a raven's call—his salutation—a guttural, high-pitched caw. He's lanky and tan; yesterday he rebuilt the entrance to his cave, hauling huge rocks to make a staircase. His hands are black with dirt, and his hair, which is going gray, looks like a bird's nest, full of dust and twigs from scrambling in the underbrush on the canyon floor. Grinning, he presents the booty from one of his weekly rituals, scavenging on the streets of Moab: a wool hat and gloves, a winter jacket, and a white nylon belt, still wrapped in plastic, along with Carhartt pants and sandals, which he's wearing. He's also scrounged cans of tuna and turkey Spam and a honeycomb candle. All in all, a nice haul from the waste product of America. "You made it," he says. I hand him a bag of apples and a block of cheese I bought at the supermarket, but the gift suddenly seems meager.
Suelo lights the candle and stokes a fire in the stove, which is an old blackened tin, the kind that Christmas cookies might come in. It's hooked to a chain of soup cans segmented like a caterpillar and fitted to a hole in the rock. Soon smoke billows into the night and the cave is warm. I think of how John the Baptist survived on honey and locusts in the desert. Suelo, who keeps a copy of the Bible for bedtime reading, is satisfied with a few grasshoppers fried in his skillet.
HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribespeople in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. "It looked," he says, "like money was impoverishing them."
The experience was transformative, but Suelo needed another decade to fashion his response. He moved to Moab and worked at a women's shelter for five years. He wanted to help people, but getting paid for it seemed dishonest—how real was help that demanded recompense? The answer lay, in part, in the Christianity of his childhood. In Suelo's nascent philosophy, following Jesus meant adopting the hard life prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. "Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt," Suelo explains on his blog, "freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt . . . grudge [or] judgment." If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favor—and also, free.
By 1999, he was living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand—he had saved just enough money for the flight. From there, he made his way to India, where he found himself in good company among the sadhus, the revered ascetics who go penniless for their gods. Numbering as many as 5 million, the sadhus can be found wandering roads and forests across the subcontinent, seeking enlightenment in self-abnegation. "I wanted to be a sadhu," Suelo says. "But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A true test of faith would be to return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth and be a sadhu there. To be a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it—the idea enchanted me."
THERE ISN'T ENOUGH SPACE IN SUELO'S cave for two, so I sleep in the open, at the edge of a hundred-foot cliff. No worries about animals, he says. Though mountain lions drink from the stream, and bobcats hunt rabbits under the cottonwoods, the worst he's experienced was a skunk that sprayed him in the face. Mice scurry over his body in the cave, and kissing bugs sometimes suck the blood from under his fingernails while he sleeps. He shrugs off these indignities. "After all, it's their cave too," he says. I hunker down near a nest of scorpions, which crawl up the canyon walls, ignoring me.
The morning ritual is simple and slow: a cup of sharp tea brewed from the needles of piñon and juniper trees, a swim in the cold emerald water where the creek pools in the red rock. Then, two naked cavemen lounging under the Utah sun. Around noon, we forage along the banks and under the cliffs, looking for the stuff of a stir-fry dinner. We find mustard plants among the rocks, the raw leaves as satisfying as cauliflower, and down in the cool of the creek—where Suelo gets his water and takes his baths (no soap for him) —we cull watercress in heads as big as supermarket lettuce, and on the bank we spot a lode of wild onions, with bulbs that pop clean from the soil. In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says.
I tell him that living without money seems difficult. What about starvation? He's never gone without a meal (friends in Moab sometimes feed him). What about getting deadly ill? It happened once, after eating a cactus he misidentified—he vomited, fell into a delirium, thought he was dying, even wrote a note for those who would find his corpse. But he got better. That it's hard is exactly the point, he says. "Hardship is a good thing. We need the challenge. Our bodies need it. Our immune systems need it. My hardships are simple, right at hand—they're manageable." When I tell him about my rent back in New York—$2,400 a month—he shakes his head. What's left unsaid is that I'm here writing about him to make money, for a magazine that depends for its survival on the advertising revenue of conspicuous consumption. As he prepares a cooking fire, Suelo tells me that years ago he had a neighbor in the canyon, an alcoholic who lived in a cave bigger than his. The old man would pan for gold in the stream and net enough cash each month to buy the beer that kept him drunk. Suelo considers the riches of our own forage. "What if we saw gold for what it is?" he says meditatively. "Gold is pretty but virtually useless. Somebody decided it has worth, and everybody accepted this decision. The natives in the Americas thought Europeans were insane because of their lust for such a useless yellow substance."
He sautés the watercress, mustard leaves, and wild onions, mixing in fresh almonds he picked from a friend's orchard and ghee made from Dumpster-dived butter, and we eat out of his soot-caked pans. From the perch on the cliff, the life of the sadhu seems reasonable. But I don't want to live in a cave. I like indoor plumbing (Suelo squats). I like electricity. Still, there's an obvious beauty in the simplicity of subsistence. It's an un-American notion these days. We don't revere our ascetics, and we dismiss the idea that money could be some kind of consensual delusion. For most of us, it's as real as the next house payment. Suelo doesn't take public assistance or use food stamps, but he does survive in part on our reality, the discarded surfeit of the money system that he denounces—a system, as it happens, that recently looked like it was headed for the cliff.
Suelo is 48, and he doesn't exactly have a 401(k). "I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured? I have great faith in the power of natural selection. And one day, I will be selected out." Until then, think of him like the raven, cleaning up the carcasses the rest of us leave behind.
http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9817&mbid=yhp&npu=1
Hey! Super sweet website!: http://www.owenmckenzie.com
I'm off to Wyoming at 6 in the a.m.
Summer is still the best I've had in years
Thank you
I needed this
COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?
MEET THE GUY WHO DOES
In Utah, a modern-day caveman has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day. People used to think he was crazy
By Christopher Ketcham
DANIEL SUELO LIVES IN A CAVE. UNLIKE THE average American—wallowing in credit-card debt, clinging to a mortgage, terrified of the next downsizing at the office—he isn't worried about the economic crisis. That's because he figured out that the best way to stay solvent is to never be solvent in the first place. Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit.
His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He's either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. Suelo's blog, which he maintains free at the Moab Public Library, suggests that he's both. "When I lived with money, I was always lacking," he writes. "Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."
On a warm day in early spring, I clamber along a set of red-rock cliffs to the mouth of his cave, where I find a note signed with a smiley face: CHRIS, FEEL FREE TO USE ANYTHING, EAT ANYTHING (NOTHING HERE IS MINE). From the outside, the place looks like a hollowed teardrop, about the size of an Amtrak bathroom, with enough space for a few pots that hang from the ceiling, a stove under a stone eave, big buckets full of beans and rice, a bed of blankets in the dirt, and not much else. Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it.
Night falls, the stars wink, and after an hour, Suelo tramps up the cliff, mimicking a raven's call—his salutation—a guttural, high-pitched caw. He's lanky and tan; yesterday he rebuilt the entrance to his cave, hauling huge rocks to make a staircase. His hands are black with dirt, and his hair, which is going gray, looks like a bird's nest, full of dust and twigs from scrambling in the underbrush on the canyon floor. Grinning, he presents the booty from one of his weekly rituals, scavenging on the streets of Moab: a wool hat and gloves, a winter jacket, and a white nylon belt, still wrapped in plastic, along with Carhartt pants and sandals, which he's wearing. He's also scrounged cans of tuna and turkey Spam and a honeycomb candle. All in all, a nice haul from the waste product of America. "You made it," he says. I hand him a bag of apples and a block of cheese I bought at the supermarket, but the gift suddenly seems meager.
Suelo lights the candle and stokes a fire in the stove, which is an old blackened tin, the kind that Christmas cookies might come in. It's hooked to a chain of soup cans segmented like a caterpillar and fitted to a hole in the rock. Soon smoke billows into the night and the cave is warm. I think of how John the Baptist survived on honey and locusts in the desert. Suelo, who keeps a copy of the Bible for bedtime reading, is satisfied with a few grasshoppers fried in his skillet.
HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribespeople in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. "It looked," he says, "like money was impoverishing them."
The experience was transformative, but Suelo needed another decade to fashion his response. He moved to Moab and worked at a women's shelter for five years. He wanted to help people, but getting paid for it seemed dishonest—how real was help that demanded recompense? The answer lay, in part, in the Christianity of his childhood. In Suelo's nascent philosophy, following Jesus meant adopting the hard life prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. "Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt," Suelo explains on his blog, "freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt . . . grudge [or] judgment." If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favor—and also, free.
By 1999, he was living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand—he had saved just enough money for the flight. From there, he made his way to India, where he found himself in good company among the sadhus, the revered ascetics who go penniless for their gods. Numbering as many as 5 million, the sadhus can be found wandering roads and forests across the subcontinent, seeking enlightenment in self-abnegation. "I wanted to be a sadhu," Suelo says. "But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A true test of faith would be to return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth and be a sadhu there. To be a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it—the idea enchanted me."
THERE ISN'T ENOUGH SPACE IN SUELO'S cave for two, so I sleep in the open, at the edge of a hundred-foot cliff. No worries about animals, he says. Though mountain lions drink from the stream, and bobcats hunt rabbits under the cottonwoods, the worst he's experienced was a skunk that sprayed him in the face. Mice scurry over his body in the cave, and kissing bugs sometimes suck the blood from under his fingernails while he sleeps. He shrugs off these indignities. "After all, it's their cave too," he says. I hunker down near a nest of scorpions, which crawl up the canyon walls, ignoring me.
The morning ritual is simple and slow: a cup of sharp tea brewed from the needles of piñon and juniper trees, a swim in the cold emerald water where the creek pools in the red rock. Then, two naked cavemen lounging under the Utah sun. Around noon, we forage along the banks and under the cliffs, looking for the stuff of a stir-fry dinner. We find mustard plants among the rocks, the raw leaves as satisfying as cauliflower, and down in the cool of the creek—where Suelo gets his water and takes his baths (no soap for him) —we cull watercress in heads as big as supermarket lettuce, and on the bank we spot a lode of wild onions, with bulbs that pop clean from the soil. In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says.
I tell him that living without money seems difficult. What about starvation? He's never gone without a meal (friends in Moab sometimes feed him). What about getting deadly ill? It happened once, after eating a cactus he misidentified—he vomited, fell into a delirium, thought he was dying, even wrote a note for those who would find his corpse. But he got better. That it's hard is exactly the point, he says. "Hardship is a good thing. We need the challenge. Our bodies need it. Our immune systems need it. My hardships are simple, right at hand—they're manageable." When I tell him about my rent back in New York—$2,400 a month—he shakes his head. What's left unsaid is that I'm here writing about him to make money, for a magazine that depends for its survival on the advertising revenue of conspicuous consumption. As he prepares a cooking fire, Suelo tells me that years ago he had a neighbor in the canyon, an alcoholic who lived in a cave bigger than his. The old man would pan for gold in the stream and net enough cash each month to buy the beer that kept him drunk. Suelo considers the riches of our own forage. "What if we saw gold for what it is?" he says meditatively. "Gold is pretty but virtually useless. Somebody decided it has worth, and everybody accepted this decision. The natives in the Americas thought Europeans were insane because of their lust for such a useless yellow substance."
He sautés the watercress, mustard leaves, and wild onions, mixing in fresh almonds he picked from a friend's orchard and ghee made from Dumpster-dived butter, and we eat out of his soot-caked pans. From the perch on the cliff, the life of the sadhu seems reasonable. But I don't want to live in a cave. I like indoor plumbing (Suelo squats). I like electricity. Still, there's an obvious beauty in the simplicity of subsistence. It's an un-American notion these days. We don't revere our ascetics, and we dismiss the idea that money could be some kind of consensual delusion. For most of us, it's as real as the next house payment. Suelo doesn't take public assistance or use food stamps, but he does survive in part on our reality, the discarded surfeit of the money system that he denounces—a system, as it happens, that recently looked like it was headed for the cliff.
Suelo is 48, and he doesn't exactly have a 401(k). "I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured? I have great faith in the power of natural selection. And one day, I will be selected out." Until then, think of him like the raven, cleaning up the carcasses the rest of us leave behind.
http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9817&mbid=yhp&npu=1
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
R.I.P, Mr. Snow
Dash Snow is Dead
by Paddy Johnson
Emerging artist Dash Snow died Monday night at Lafayette House, a hotel in lower Manhattan, of a drug overdose. A member of the prominent de Menil family, which includes art collector and philanthropist Christophe de Menil and Dia Art Foundation founder Dominique de Menil, Snow ran away from home at 13 and eventually developed a celebrity status of his own within the downtown art scene. Snow married artist Agathe Snow in 1999, and is survived by his two-year-old daughter with model Jade Berreau, Secret Magic Nico Snow. The New York Times reported that according to his grandmother, Christophe de Menil, Snow began rehabilitation in March and had, until very recently, not been using drugs.
Snow gained notoriety after being featured in the New York Magazine article “Warhol’s Children” by Ariel Levy in January 2007, a profile that now uniquely reads as his impending obituary. His friends spoke candidly about their fear of losing Snow to the perils of his lifestyle. Famed photographer Ryan McGinley catalogued not only his own work, but also that of Dash: “You never know what’s going to happen with Dash,” he told Levy.
Never confining himself to a single medium, Snow’s Polaroids, installation art, and ejaculate-splattered press clippings are each distinctly expressive. The self-taught artist exhibited a natural talent for compositional arrangement and color balance that produced gritty and visceral documentation of his life.
Ultimately, it also serves as a sad marker of that life's short trajectory. “When it comes down to it, Dash is wild, a wild kid,” McGinley told Levy in the New York article. “...[F]or me, it’s always sort of about creating a fantasy. It’s, like, the life I wish that I was living. For Dash, it’s really the life.”
Dash Snow’s art has been shown at Deitch Projects, Rivington Arms, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and was recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum. His work is currently featured in “Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture” at the Saatchi Gallery in London.
http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/dash-snow-is-dead/Content?oid=1202374
(Somewhere; in the center )
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
this guy just kinda blew me away
Dash Snow
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Object day #8
The power of what, I consider to be, a fairly simple gesture:
Dispute over flag protest erupts in Wisc. village
By ROBERT IMRIE, Associated Press Writer Robert Imrie, Associated Press Writer – Fri Jul 10, 2:44 pm ET
WAUSAU, Wis. – An American flag flown upside down as a protest in a northern Wisconsin village was seized by police before a Fourth of July parade and the businessman who flew it — an Iraq war veteran — claims the officers trespassed and stole his property.
A day after the parade, police returned the flag and the man's protest — over a liquor license — continued.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin is considering legal action against the village of Crivitz for violating Vito Congine Jr.'s' First Amendment rights, Executive Director Chris Ahmuty said.
"It is not often that you see something this blatant," Ahmuty said.
In mid-June, Congine, 46, began flying the flag upside down — an accepted way to signal distress — outside the restaurant he wants to open in Crivitz, a village of about 1,000 people some 65 miles north of Green Bay.
He said his distress is likely bankruptcy because the village board refused to grant him a liquor license after he spent nearly $200,000 to buy and remodel a downtown building for an Italian supper club.
Congine's upside-down-flag represents distress to him; to others in town, it represents disrespect of the flag.
Hours before a Fourth of July parade, four police officers went to Congine's property and removed the flag under the advice of Marinette County District Attorney Allen Brey.
Neighbor Steven Klein watched in disbelief.
"I said, 'What are you doing?' Klein said. "They said, 'It is none of your business.'"
The next day, police returned the flag.
Brey declined comment Friday.
Marinette County Sheriff Jim Kanikula said it was not illegal to fly the flag upside down but people were upset and it was the Fourth of July.
"It is illegal to cause a disruption," he said.
The parade went on without any problems, Kanikula said.
Village President John Deschane, 60, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, said many people in town believe it's disrespectful to fly the flag upside down.
"If he wants to protest, let him protest but find a different way to do it," Deschane said.
Congine, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq in 2004, said he intends to keep flying the flag upside down.
"It is pretty bad when I go and fight a tyrannical government somewhere else," Congine said, "and then I come home to find it right here at my front door."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_re_us/us_upside_down_flag
Friday, July 10, 2009
ready to get back and get to work
I know it's really early, and my summer isn't over for another month and a half, but I'm feeling really good about getting back to CT; excited even. I feel like I've already had a good amount of time to step back and reflect on the past year, and I'm feeling really happy. Utah is going to be the perfect way to end my summer as well. I've collected just about all the experience and info I need from FL. As such, I'm excited to absorb all I need from Utah and apply it to my last year in CT. I have a really really good feeling about what's to come.
(except for the cold... but that's not for another couple of months. I should start preparing and making a plan of action for it now)
Thursday, July 9, 2009
object day #7
earlyearly:
One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings. It is an exciting world of it's own with it's own strange laws and it's own adventures. Nobody should think he knows all about it, for nobody does. Nothing, perhaps, is more important than just this: that to enjoy these works we must have a fresh mind, one which is ready to catch every hint and to respond to every hidden harmony: a mind, most of all, not cluttered up with long high-sounding words and ready-made phrases. It is infinitely better not to know anything about art than to have the kind of half-knowledge which makes for snobbishness. The danger is very real. there are people, for instance, who have picked up the simple points I have tried to make in this chapter, and who understand that there are great works of art which have none of the obvious qualities of beauty of expression or correct draughtsmanship, but who become so proud of their knowledge that they pretend to like only those works which are neither "beautiful" nor "correctly drawn". They are always haunted by the fear that they might be considered uneducated if they confessed to liking a work which they really find somewhat repulsive. I should hate to be responsible for any similar misunderstanding. I would rather not be believed at all then be believed in such an uncritical way.
The Essential Gombrich: Selected Writings on Art and Culture, E.H. Gombrish (page 79)
Neat image I found whilst googling:
One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings. It is an exciting world of it's own with it's own strange laws and it's own adventures. Nobody should think he knows all about it, for nobody does. Nothing, perhaps, is more important than just this: that to enjoy these works we must have a fresh mind, one which is ready to catch every hint and to respond to every hidden harmony: a mind, most of all, not cluttered up with long high-sounding words and ready-made phrases. It is infinitely better not to know anything about art than to have the kind of half-knowledge which makes for snobbishness. The danger is very real. there are people, for instance, who have picked up the simple points I have tried to make in this chapter, and who understand that there are great works of art which have none of the obvious qualities of beauty of expression or correct draughtsmanship, but who become so proud of their knowledge that they pretend to like only those works which are neither "beautiful" nor "correctly drawn". They are always haunted by the fear that they might be considered uneducated if they confessed to liking a work which they really find somewhat repulsive. I should hate to be responsible for any similar misunderstanding. I would rather not be believed at all then be believed in such an uncritical way.
The Essential Gombrich: Selected Writings on Art and Culture, E.H. Gombrish (page 79)
Neat image I found whilst googling:
object day #6
fungus/sea urchin:
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy their paints, and design posters for hoardings; they did and do many other things. There is no harm in calling all these activities art as long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and as long as we realize that Art with a capital A has no exhistence. For Art with a capital A has come to be something bogey and a fetish. You may crush an artist by telling him that what he has just done may be quite good in it's own way, only it is not 'Art'. And you may confound anyone enjoying a picture by declaring that what he liked in it was not Art but something different.
The Essential Gombrich: Selected Writings on Art and Culture, E.H. Gombrish (page 65)
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy their paints, and design posters for hoardings; they did and do many other things. There is no harm in calling all these activities art as long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and as long as we realize that Art with a capital A has no exhistence. For Art with a capital A has come to be something bogey and a fetish. You may crush an artist by telling him that what he has just done may be quite good in it's own way, only it is not 'Art'. And you may confound anyone enjoying a picture by declaring that what he liked in it was not Art but something different.
The Essential Gombrich: Selected Writings on Art and Culture, E.H. Gombrish (page 65)
object day #5
latelatelate:
Greenpeace activists arrested for banner on Mount Rushmore
Wed Jul 8, 6:29 pm ET
CHICAGO (AFP) – Greenpeace activists were arrested Wednesday for scaling Mount Rushmore and hanging a banner next to the carved face of Abraham Lincoln urging President Barack Obama to get tough on climate change.
A video posted on the environmental group's website showed the massive banner hanging on the South Dakota mountain face.
Its message -- "America honors leaders not politicians: Stop Global Warming" and an unfinished portrait of Obama -- was barely visible as it was whipped by wind.
"Doing what it takes to solve global warming demands real political courage," Greenpeace USA deputy campaigns director Carroll Muffett said in a statement.
"If President Obama intends to earn a place among this country's true leaders, he needs to show that courage, and base his actions on the scientific reality rather than political convenience."
The protest comes as Obama meets with other G8 leaders in Italy.
G8 leaders agreed to bear the brunt of steep global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, saying developed countries should reduce their pollution by 80 percent by 2050, a summit declaration said.
Greenpeace said the 11 climbers "took special care not to damage the monument, using existing anchors placed by the National Park Service for periodic cleaning."
Park officials said they were still investigating whether the iconic monument -- a restricted area which is closely monitored -- suffered damage.
"Early this morning visitors saw these individuals on the mountain," said Amy Bracewell, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service.
"They got up next to Abraham Lincoln and unfurled the large banner," she told AFP.
"As soon as our people were mobilized we took down the banner and apprehended them and got them safely down the mountain."
Greenpeace activists arrested for banner on Mount Rushmore
Wed Jul 8, 6:29 pm ET
CHICAGO (AFP) – Greenpeace activists were arrested Wednesday for scaling Mount Rushmore and hanging a banner next to the carved face of Abraham Lincoln urging President Barack Obama to get tough on climate change.
A video posted on the environmental group's website showed the massive banner hanging on the South Dakota mountain face.
Its message -- "America honors leaders not politicians: Stop Global Warming" and an unfinished portrait of Obama -- was barely visible as it was whipped by wind.
"Doing what it takes to solve global warming demands real political courage," Greenpeace USA deputy campaigns director Carroll Muffett said in a statement.
"If President Obama intends to earn a place among this country's true leaders, he needs to show that courage, and base his actions on the scientific reality rather than political convenience."
The protest comes as Obama meets with other G8 leaders in Italy.
G8 leaders agreed to bear the brunt of steep global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, saying developed countries should reduce their pollution by 80 percent by 2050, a summit declaration said.
Greenpeace said the 11 climbers "took special care not to damage the monument, using existing anchors placed by the National Park Service for periodic cleaning."
Park officials said they were still investigating whether the iconic monument -- a restricted area which is closely monitored -- suffered damage.
"Early this morning visitors saw these individuals on the mountain," said Amy Bracewell, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service.
"They got up next to Abraham Lincoln and unfurled the large banner," she told AFP.
"As soon as our people were mobilized we took down the banner and apprehended them and got them safely down the mountain."
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Object day #4
It probably won’t surprise regular Art Fag City visitors to read that while I like the idea of an art world-based Bravo reality show, I’m not without reservations. Series such as these possess the potential to reduce the number of “artists only get famous after they’re dead” myths circulating popular culture, but just how much does an artist get out of participating in a show like this?
It would seem the outcome is mixed at best. Last week, Unutterable pointed us to a must-read NY Magazine feature on Bravo reality shows such as Project Runway and Top Chef, which exposed the cracks in the carefully constructed fantasy that gifted amateurs can break into the big time. Undoubtedly the most obvious art world parallel presents itself in the “Where Are They Now?” section of the article. “As a rule, it’s the older, more established contestants who are best able to take advantage of their exposure, simply because they already have the means,” writes Jennifer Senior. This sentiment is reminiscent of those expressed by myself and Skowhegan’s Executive Director of Programs Linda Earle last year regarding their prestigious residency. Artists find it harder to capitalize on the connections made at the school when their careers are just beginning.
Although the NY Mag feature doesn’t touch on this point, the biggest problem the winners of this show are likely to experience will be having their art making practice pigeonholed. Successful artists already suffer from this tendency—it is a challenge to sell art that radically departs from work that already has an established market. But this phenomenon will only be exasperated by a series that generates notoriety through project based art work made within such a short period of time. Given that this preexisting rigidity in the market isn’t known to produce great results for art, the show seems poised to create just as many, if not more, artists unable to capitalize on their fame as previous Bravo shows.
http://www.artfagcity.com/, Monday,July 6, 2009
I'm in the middle of the road with this one... I think it's a good idea because it will expose more people to the contemporary art world (perhaps dissolve some of the myths that are attached to it). On the other hand, I have a feeling the artists that do participate in the show aren't going to be all that great. I assume that no really intelligent artist would want to subject himself/herself to that sort of nonsense, unless it's what their work is about. I predict that the artists will be the lot that creates mediocre, mainstream art. Or you could just say the show will create the next Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, or Takashi Murakami... doubt it though.
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