From Craig Damrauer’s New Math
If It’s Important, You’ll Find A Way. If It Isn’t, You’ll Find An Excuse
[Via thecoolhunter]
(via whereart)
I'm Sick Of Pretending: I Don't "Get" Art -
For all the credit I give contemporary art these days, this article did resonate with my current frustration in the art world. It might be an anecdotal diatribe against a single show that missed the mark, but there’s still a ring of truth hidden in there. The bad photos and obviously reactionary stance don’t represent the show in its best light, and it might just be a bad egg in the basket, but we’ve got to be honest with ourselves. Sometimes, art is just bad.
[video]
Another invitation for my graphic design portfolio, and another night of almost no sleep. I’ve got to stop doing that.
Olympics coming to London means even places like Primark are capitalizing on the national spirit. Bringing back Ginger Spice’s wardrobe one £8 dress at a time.
May Morning = no sleep. Apparently it’s a ‘thing’ in Oxford to stay up all night and watch some choir people sing on top of a tower at sunrise. Pretty cool (and rainy).
Spent the evening with good friends at my favorite cafe (Turl St. Kitchen) dancing, chatting, eating, bonding over fatigue and exhaustion and caffeine. Passed on the singing to fetch bicycles and promote Museum From The Future, pretending we were from 2042 and handing out flyers to the remaining drunken revelers. Soaking wet and starving, we finally called it a day (morning?) at 8:30am. I’m exhausted. And gloriously happy.
In place of the difficulty involved in seeking out the literary canon, younger people are coming to rely on search engines to do their thinking for them. The end result of this will be a standardisation of understanding itself, as people become unable to think outside of the box-shaped screen. — Will Self, A Point of View: In defence of obscure words
Journal de Nîmes Nº1 (by Tenue de Nîmes)
[video]
Art.sy -
Have you heard about this new project? It’s a website with over 15,000 works by 3,000 artists, fully searchable, with the ability to create your own collection and preferences based on things you like. It’s in partnership with the Art Genome Project (whose website seems woefully out of date), which is “an ongoing effort to map the characteristics that connect the world’s artists and artworks. We call these characteristics ‘genes.’” Sort of like Pandora or last.fm, but for art.
I don’t know how many ‘genes’ there are, but a team of historians and professionals assigns each piece between 30-40 genes based on a range of 1-100, capturing how strongly a gene applies to a certain work of art. I wonder what this will do for compartmentalization and canonization of artists in the future. Artists are so good at subverting what’s expected I wonder if someone will create a piece that captures no genes at all (or all the genes at once).
I like the website so far, and got permission to join because I’m a student at Oxford and might incorporate them into my dissertation (also I just wanted to check it out during beta testing). The best feature in my mind is that I can “like” certain artworks, and the website will recommend similar artists and pieces. If I were a collector it would be quite a good way to discover new talent.
Their investors are quite posh: the founder of Paypal, the creator of Twitter, the CEO of Pandora… I’m curious how the power will play out in a mission of “mak[ing] all of the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.” Wealthy art collectors in the early 1900s felt the same way but museums still struggle to reconcile the wealthy with the less fortunate.
But good on them for trying.
[video]
In order to succeed, your desire to succeed has to be stronger than your fear of failure. — Groucho Marx? Bill Cosby? Not sure who said this but I like it
Our interpretive practices have a material effect on the world; there is a materiality to the text. Together they create the conditions that make the world visible. We change the world by changing the way we make it visible. — Norman Denzin