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.

Want!

ruineshumaines:

Moss Table generates electricity through Photosynthesis.
Here electricity is generated from the electrons captured by conductive fibers inside the moss table. The technology turns energy that would otherwise be wasted in the photosynthesis process into power that can be put to practical use. (by Biophotovoltaics)

May the Fourth be with you…

"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

Read the full article here

Oxford Folk Weekend = so nice. Watched Emily Spiers and the Tunesmiths from inside the Ashmolean Museum, then headed over to the Crisis Skyline Cafe where a lone accordion player regaled us with nostalgic strands of breathing melody. I could spend every weekend like this.

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 It’s in partnership with the Art Genome Project (whose website seems woefully out of date), which is “an ongoing effort to map the characteristics that connect the world’s artists and artworks.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.

Holy wow, this drawing is incredible. Some day I aspire to be half this good!

devidsketchbook:

Karl Haendel - Knight #1, 2010 pencil on paper 103 x 79 in (261.6 x 200.7 cm)

(via devidsketchbook)

"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