Sunday 25 March 2012

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Writer Nicholas Carr speculates that our constant Internet trolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. He wonders if modern man’s addiction to technology is weakening his ability to engage in deep thought.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

Shadowlands movie

Beautiful movie, so moving.
I love some of the quotes of this movie " Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal. "
its completely riveting, and gives you the effect that you can actually feel the emotion they are giving off within the movie.
 This is one of my most appreciated movies...tells so much about people and how complex they are, true love, and a progression of understanding life and death.

Thursday 22 March 2012

Stiff Upper Lips movie

"Sinyor revels in the snooty aristos, the wrinkled retainers, the corseted beauties, the bons mots and buttoned-up passions of BritLit cinema at its most risibly predictable. The story, set in 1908 and divided into 'chapters' introduced by curlicued intertitles, is a nonsensical romance that follows the sentimental education ('I want my sexual awakening and I want it now!') of young Emily (Cates), torn between Lawrentian, well-hung scum-of-the-earth George (Pertwee) and the upper crust suitors favoured by her aunt Agnes (Scales) and halfwit brother Edward (West). As the characters leave Ivory Hall for a rather less than Grand Tour of Tuscany and India, the heat and lust, linens and (portable) lawns, fillies and facial hair take their toll. Frequently silly, consistently spot on, and beautifully acted, this may be obvious, but it's a delight. While the gags, visual and verbal, are precise enough to lampoon the excesses of individual movies, the tone remains affectionate, from the opening salvo against Chariots of Fire bombast to Glover's ludicrously servile underling and Ustinov's dotty colonial plantation owner. Spiffing!"
http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/75364/stiff-upper-lips.html

BRILLIANT!!!


Robert Williams

"We  got nothing better to do than watch TV and have a couple of brews." Those are lyrics from TV Party by the 1980's West Coast hardcore punk band Black Flag. This song was blaring through the Tony Shafrazi gallery while I admired the painting "Symbiotic Mediocrity," where two TV-set-head characters sit idly in the mid-foreground of a barren landscape amongst a glazed over blue-green sky. The characters face each other and are programmed to replicate the images of themselves, like two mirrors adjacent to one another, reducing the figures to dormant ape like creatures with a parasitic host upon their heads (usually in the animal kingdom it is a pesky flea). I laughed out loud at once gazing at the picture and listening to the song juxtaposing one another. The choice to play this song (whether it was on shuffle and unintentional or planned) fit the context of Robert Williams' solo show almost perfectly.
In no way does Robert Williams' art suggest an ideology as bland as having nothing better to do, but it is a more progressive approach to the punk rock aesthetic of being fed up with the current state of affairs. For Robert Williams that condition began a decade earlier during the late 1960's when conceptual art in the form of minimalism and pop art, surpassed the prevailing mainstream mode of formalist and non-representational painting that was Abstract Expressionism. Williams was treading uncharted waters when he combined the age-old aesthetic of realism with the conceptual ideologies of pop art and the absurdities of surrealism. He created a style of fine art painting that was soaked with cartoon and comic book imagery. He even gave the first series of paintings the name "Lowbrow," which was a stab at the art world's obsession with putting academic and intellectualism on fine art. The art schools were all teaching formalism and for talented draftsmen like R. Crumb, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and Robert Williams, there was no place for "illustrators" amongst the hierarchy. Critics like Clement Greenberg who advocated the abstraction of Pollock, De Kooning and Reinhartd helped to implicate such an unfavorable view of figurative painting. However, Pollock and de Kooning both returned to painting recognizable imagery. It was of no surprise that Willem de Koonings' "Women" series, which used gestural handling of the paint and formalist compositional theory to create a recognizable image, drew sharp criticism from critics and even his own Ab Ex peers.  In the catalog for Emotional Impact: New York School Figurative Expressionism, curator April Kingsley writes that at one particular meeting of the "Artists Club" Ad Reinhartd even went so far as to say that the only difference he saw between de Kooning and Norman Rockwell was that Rockwell had a higher opinion of women. For Robert Williams, whose figuration was far more realistically rendered than de Kooning, this wasn't a good sign of things to come. 


more:http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/12-02-2009_robert-williams-ny-s-tony-shafrazi-gallery.htm

liverpool

Wednesday 21 March 2012

BBC - The Mona Lisa Curse

A. S. J. Tessimond's poetry

Poetry from A. S. J. Tessimond:

The British
We are a people living in shells and moving
Crablike; reticent, awkward, deeply suspicious;
Watching the world from a corner of half-closed eyelids,
Afraid lest someone show that he hates or loves us,
Afraid lest someone weep in the railway train.

We are coiled and clenched like a foetus clad in armour.
We hold our hearts for fear they fly like eagles.
We grasp our tongues for fear they cry like trumpets.
We listen to our own footsteps. We look both ways
Before we cross the silent empty road.

We are a people easily made uneasy,
Especially wary of praise, of passion, of scarlet
Cloaks, of gesturing hands, of the smiling stranger
In the alien hat who talks to all or the other
In the unfamiliar coat who talks to none.

We are afraid of too-cold thought or too-hot
Blood, of the opening of long-shut shafts or cupboards,
Of light in caves, of X-rays, probes, unclothing
Of emotion, intolerable revelation
Of lust in the light, of love in the palm of the hand.

We are afraid of, one day on a sunny morning,
Meeting ourselves or another without the usual
Outer sheath, the comfortable conversation,
And saying all, all, all we did not mean to,
All, all, all we did not know we meant.

Monday 19 March 2012

MAD MAD WORLD

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.” John Lennon



Elvis Presley portrait by Andy Warhol could fetch $50m
An iconic portrait of Elvis Presley by pop artist Andy Warhol is poised to fetch as much as $50 million (£32 million) when it hits the auction block in May, Sotheby's said on Thursday.

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/9148630/Elvis-Presley-portrait-by-Andy-Warhol-could-fetch-50m.html


What civilization is.....

"What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.

And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

This is something, culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.

Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important. But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines"
(Terence McKenna)

Friday 16 March 2012

Alexandre Madureira

http://alexandremadureira.blogspot.com/2012/02/who-wants-to-live-forever.html

  acrylic on canvas 150x150cm

 VANITAS
vanidades, todo es vanidad)
 acrylic on canvas 150x150cm
from the serie DO THE WINDOWS HAVE MY SIGNATURE?
http://alexandremadureira.blogspot.com/

Kerry Darlington at Rennies Art Gallery

The Mad hatter's Tea party - a fabulous new release from Kerry Darlington



Russian Blue 2011

"Modern art isn't rubbish" by Jonathan Jones

Modern art isn't rubbish

I've given up hating contemporary art, because it has embraced the future and become, ironically, modern once again
Posted by
Jonathan Jones
Tuesday 7 April 2009 
guardian.co.uk



The first time someone accused me of hating modern art, I was confused. I love modern art, I replied. I revere Cézanne. I adore Matisse. It took a few minutes to understand that "modern art" in this conversation meant what I would call contemporary art, the art of today, as opposed to a type of art that evolved in the later 19th century and reached full self-awareness about a century ago, with the incendiary works of Picasso and the rivalrous responses of Matisse.

Modernism, I would have replied at the time, ended in about 1960. Now I'm not so sure. It seemed very naive and historically stupid, a few years ago, for people to be calling the work of, say, Antony Gormley or Tracey Emin "modern art". It appeared to be an unfortunate educational side effect of the rebranding of the Tate. In calling a new museum with a strongly contemporary flavour "Tate Modern", the world's most influential art institution rode roughshod over definitions, categories, accuracy. How many times have I complained, "but it's really Tate Post-Modern". And yet, it no longer seems such a dumb or confused choice of words.

We live in modern times - again. Every generation thinks it does, of course. The new is always new. But these times are the most rapidly, unpredictably and promisingly molten since the 1900s when Picasso was creating cubism. At the time when modern art exploded into being, the world was visibly becoming a different place: electric light, the first powered flight, the motor car, the phonograph, radio, cinema ... It was a moment of incredible excitement and possibility. Between, say, 1890 and 1914, the world became, in a word, modern.
Today, changes of comparable depth and grandeur are taking place. Modern life is becoming – well, more modern. We're entering the science fiction age. New technologies are materialising and mutating with a speed that's utterly exhilarating. I guess this is why I've given up hating what that person meant by "modern art". In a world changing as fast as ours, you can't really ask artists not to be excited by the endless metamorphoses of everything. We can no longer be cynical about modernity. Look at this blog, for instance. Here's a new form, a new genre, a totally new understanding of being a critic.

Everything's changing, and the changes promise ... who knows. Perhaps a "post-human" future, a time of cyborgs. Again, that is how it looked to people a century ago, when Brancusi and Duchamp were creating images of the robotic and alien.

Art now is "modern", perhaps even modernist. It's certainly not postmodern any more. That definition really belongs to the 1980s, when the decline of socialism and fall of state communism created the illusion of a time after history. Some call these times "altermodern", but I think the right word is, simply, modern. Artists are trying to respond to the new, the modern, in ways at once liberated and uneasy. It is a courageous moment, and at least, this time around, we have a tradition of the new to help us find our bearings.

So, I love modern art, 1907 - ?

Jonathan Jones

Thursday 15 March 2012

martin creed at TATE

i cannot stand that kind of "art"

maybe i am not art educated enough....for understanding the abject art. i do not.

The abject art is both shocking and overcrossing the boundaries. It works with sh$t, with vomits, with blood and other human liquids, with substances which shouldn’t be shown. It’s based on idea of humiliation and degradation, and connected with the lower status of human activity, with all this crumbs which stays, when everything else was already thrown off. Abject art brought to the gallery space the body, destroying the sanctity of the place.



ready for a spring from lolitas

love it!

love this lamp from gangdesign

The Gentlewoman




Content:
Issue five of The Gentlewoman boasts an array of brilliant and inventive women – daring iconoclasts who have never shied away from challenges, provocation or controversy. Actress Tilda Swinton, singer Sinéad O’Connor, Internet pioneer Martha Lane Fox, tennis star Maria Sharapova and the legendary supermodel turned activist, Christy Turlington are among the courageous women interviewed about their remarkable lives and fascinating careers. Chic fashions abound in this fifth edition, offering powerful, glamorous and fun suggestions for the summer months ahead.
Oh wow indeed!
Editor in Chief: Penny Martin
Creative Director: Jop van Bennekom
Fashion Director: Jonathan Kaye
Publisher: Adam Saletti
Published by Fantastic Woman Ltd., Gert Jonkers & Jop van Bennekom

http://www.thegentlewoman.com/


"For me,trying to be happy on my own terms is part of being a feminist. Woman are constantly under attack. Whether it’s with awful shoes or the idea that we shouldn’t aim too high. We should all aim for absolute sovereign happiness, always" (Lucy McKenzie )

depression...

"For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future" (Elie Wiesel )



they are said to me: “ooh stop reading this sh…! come on – life is beautiful!”

yeap...
 i wish...
 if I do stop reading fricking news the world around will become perfect?

i wish i never read this

i wish capital punishment everywhere in the 'globe' for them




Wednesday 14 March 2012

Soleil City Car

Soleil City Car folds into a luggage for trouble free parking

 http://www.designbuzz.com/soleil-city-car-folds-luggage-trouble-free-parking.html

 The two-seater Soleil City Car concept, a collaboration project between designer Caghan Engin Cesmeci and Emre Gurel, aims at providing a space efficient transport option for historical cities with narrow streets. Since it would be virtually impossible to widen the streets in neighborhoods with historic buildings, a city car that makes the best use of the existing space holds a lot of merit. The high tech minimalist vehicles offer users an easy to drive transport option when on road and when no longer in need they can simply be folded into a luggage like bag and stored.

Though the designers have not elaborated how exactly will a foldable vehicle work and how easy would it be to carry it to say, an apartment or a hotel room, but the concept appears to be a step in the right direction when it comes to looking for solutions to traffic congestion and clogged parking spots in older cities.
The electricity-run vehicle boasts of an aerodynamic design that is slick enough to navigate through even the narrowest of city lanes. for maximum protection, a strong yet lightweight material would be used to fashion the frame and the shell of the vehicle itself will be crafted using a rubber-like composite material to allow it to be folded easily. In-wheel motors would allow the vehicle to run engine-less and compact yet super-efficient batteries would be used to power the vehicle.


 http://www.designbuzz.com/soleil-city-car-folds-luggage-trouble-free-parking.html

 

jan fabre

 Searching for Utopia by Jan Fabre, Nieuwpoort, Belgium




"John and Yoko famously spent their honeymoon in bed in Amsterdam’s Hilton Hotel on the Apollolaan. If Artzuid had been on at the time, it may have drawn them down to the street"
http://richardtulloch.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/artzuid-amsterdams-sculpture-biennale-opens/

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Kippenberger artwork worth €800,000 'cleaned' away

Kippenberger artwork worth €800,000 'cleaned' away


A cleaning woman at a museum in Dortmund who mistook a Martin Kippenberger sculpture for an unsightly mess has destroyed the valuable artwork beyond recognition.
The cleaner at the city's Ostwall Museum went to work on the Kippenberger installation entitled "When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling" which was valued by insurers at €800,000 ($1.1 million), a museum spokeswoman said on Thursday.

The late contemporary master had created a tower of wooden slats under which a rubber trough was placed with a thin beige layer of paint representing dried rain water. Taking it for an actual stain, the cleaner scrubbed the surface until it gleamed.

"It is now impossible to return it to its original state," the spokeswoman said, adding that the damage had been discovered late last month and that the work had been on loan to the museum from a private collector.

She said that cleaning crews had orders to remain 20 centimetres (eight inches) away from artworks but it was unclear if the woman had received the directive from the external company that employed her.

Works of art not infrequently fall victim to zealous cleaners. In 1986, a "grease stain" by Joseph Beuys valued at around 400,000 euros was mopped away at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, western Germany.

AFP/mry
http://www.thelocal.de/society/20111103-38649.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/03/overzealous-cleaner-ruins-artwork

Marijke van Warmerdam



Dutch artist Marijke van Warmerdam's first project for the web is informed with a limpid simplicity and disarming straightforwardness that is a hallmark of all her work in every medium. And yet like such other memorable projects as Le retour du chapeau, 1998, and Lichte Stelle, 2000, it ultimately resists rational exegesis. Through its beguiling ineffability it imprints itself indelibly in one's mind.

The opening sequence sets the tone. The hammer and an ornamental star, a fairy's wand, hover mysteriously in space -- an anomalous couple on first glance, they are nonetheless quintessential emblems for artistic practice: visionary inspiration and manual craft, apparition and artisanal skill.

When, in the next scene, the hammer does assume its normal functional role, it is within the context of a game, a child's toy so basic and familiar it might have originated in any contemporary culture in the recent past or present. Once at work, it opens to another mise-en-scene, equally immediate and direct. A line drawing in light, sketched by a hand that yet again remains invisible, limns a house in a rudimentary sketch, at once archetypal and universal: its form could be made as plausibly by a child learning to draw as by an adult doodling. This prototype or model of a standard visual sign or ideogram serves as the vehicle through which van Warmerdam probes the relation between a concept and its instantiation, the ideational and its materialization, for drawing is a language which may conjure the world as effortlessly and vividly as any semiotic system, textual, gestural, aural.

In a characteristically generous gesture, van Warmerdam offers the work to the viewer in the form of a CD, which may be burned from the computer, and a simple sleeve, made by printing then folding and joining several pieces of paper into a cover to store and house it.

As in so many of her key works the brevity and concision that determine and govern the final realization of the piece belie the elaborate thought, the process of articulating the initial idea, and its conceptual eloquence. Elaborating on this distilled geste is akin to parsing a haiku, any explanation or account quickly overburdens the work, otiose and cumbersome, it muffles rather than illuminates the signature �lan at the heart of her best works. These are works to be savored and shared, to be revisited in one's mind or passed on to another, drawn irresistibly by a magical magnetic charm as potent, gentle and irresistible as that which aligns the tool and the toy star in an amiable coupling.

Lynne Cooke
http://awp.diaart.org/vanwarmerdam/intro.html

Monday 12 March 2012

"Art is the greatest deception of all"

"Art is the greatest deception of all. Art is the deception that creates real emotion, a lie that creates a truth, and when you give yourself over to that deception it becomes magic" (Marco Tempest)

Sunday 11 March 2012

he is bloody hilarious!




how i found him?
thanks Jonathan Jones!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/jul/01/modern-art-super-rich-sothebys


I am Damien Hirst. I am an unknown non-profit artist from Slovenia. I am doing art by doing art. My art glorifies the futileness of being an artist. It's a parody of the belief in nothing. My purpose is to demystify everything that was mystified in the name of art. Art is a religion and I am an atheist. My goal is the appropriation of art as an intellectual interpretation to reverse the process of applying artistic value to objects and concepts. I am not just doing art but I am doing art by doing art and by doing so I am basically undoing art. I am undoing art by simulating the process of being an artist doing art but without applying any value (not even in money) to it. The art I produce as an artist means nothing and costs nothing yet is done in the same way a "meaningful" and expensive work of art is done. I am Damien Hirst and I am artistic.
http://www.damienhirst.si/


 My mission is to decrease the value of art expressed in money and increase the value of art expressed in the true love for it. I want art to be cheap but loved and admired. I want art to stop being exclusive and start being for everyone. I want art to belong to those who can see beauty in it and not those who can afford to buy it. I want art to make a difference. I want art to be fake, meaningless and cheap. Because only in this way one could learn to appreciate art for only one true reason - because it is art. I want our world to get infected by art. I want an art pandemic.
http://www.damienhirst.si/

http://hirstdamien.blogspot.com/

you are quite right, Mr. Jones

Don't believe the hype about contemporary art
Posted by
Jonathan Jones

Like the economy, 21st-century British art is running on false credit. How many truly great living artists can you count?
In the Musée d'Orsay in Paris hang the revolutionary works of painters who made art modern in France more than a century ago. Here they are, the true greats of early modernism: Cézanne and Van Gogh, as well as Gauguin and Degas, Monet and, of course, Seurat. That's six, and there are obviously several more profoundly important figures in France at that time, including Toulouse-Lautrec and Odilon Redon. That makes eight. And there are more, too, including sculptors led by Rodin. Perhaps you could bring the figure up to 16, even 20, without scraping the barrel.

Say we agree, generously, that 20 artists genuinely mattered in late 19th-century France at the dawn of modernism, one of the truly great moments of art history. Now, how many living British artists are regarded as important, unmissable, revolutionary? To judge from the bonanza of 21st-century British art touted in newspaper articles, art fairs, group shows, magazines and a host of solo shows at legions of galleries, there must be – what? – a hundred, no, more like two hundred names to conjure with.

So this must be the greatest moment ever in the story of art, a cultural golden age to put fifth-century Athens to shame.

Or could 21st-century British art possibly be overhyped?

Come on – do the sums – they don't add up. The young and middle-aged artists celebrated in Britain today cannot all be marvellous. Just as Britain's economy in recent times turned out to be running on false credit, so too our art scene has ballooned into a mass delusion.

How many great works of art can we actually count that our age will bequeath posterity? Where are our Sunflowers, our apples and our dancers.
There is a pitiful gulf between noise and achievement in contemporary British art. Of course, we have some good artists, some very good artists, and maybe a couple of great ones. But the vast majority of exhibitions are slight and huge numbers of artists are "farting around", as I observed of Mark Leckey the other day. I did not mean to imply he is the only bad artist. In fact, truly honest art criticism in Britain today would mostly consist of reviews like that one.

Look – as I say – do the maths. You must know how many, or rather how few, artists it is possible to truly love, how small the selection of artworks that really make an impact is. Now pick up any art magazine and sample the latest haul of significant, new, radical, cool artists: it seems there never has been and never will be an age when artists of real value proliferate so readily. Therefore, by plain logic and common sense, a vast proportion of the art we hear so much about in Britain today must be rubbish. It's that simple.

Posted by
Jonathan Jones
Thursday 26 May 2011 14.59 BST guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/may/26/hype-british-contemporary-art


Brilliant article. 
Or it is just Mr. Jones opinion...
In my opinion it is not only about British artists. It is about whole global art. New one - "art the conceptual" - shocking and laud. 
"Art for art sake"… and it understandable and appreciated only by art educated critics who cannot tell honest opinion because then they will be criticising by art tycoons – art dealers…art historian and art theoretic…
I think a lot about recent biennial artists…
I cannot tell anything. Anything at all.
It is just sad and pity. It was only two artists presented yet…but…it still absolutely - …whatever.
They have their excuses. Always. From the history and from wise people.
They probably think about themselves as about a genius.
Maybe they are right…


“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” (Albert Einstein)

“Genius - the ability to produce fantastic amounts of equally fantastic bullshit that all makes perfect sense”
(Jason Zebehazy)

Friday 9 March 2012

"I pray to the sunbeam from the window -
It is pale, thin, straight.
Since morning I have been silent,
And my heart - is split.
The copper on my washstand
Has turned green,
But the sunbeam plays on it
So charmingly.
How innocent it is, and simple,
In the evening calm,
But to me in this deserted temple
It’s like a golden celebration,
And a consolation."
( Anna Akhmatova)