January 2010
27 posts
The Western Round Table on Modern Art (1949) →
ubu.com
Participants: George Boas, Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Frankenstein, Robert Goldwater, Darius Milhaud, Andrew C Richie, Arnold Schoenburg, Mark Tobey and Frank Lloyd Wright. Audio, images, transcripts, notes.
“Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.”
—John Gruber
“I cannot emphasise enough this point: ‘Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it.’”
—Stephen Fry’s terrific on the iPad.
Berlin to Resurrect its Disgraced Monuments →
spiegel.de
100 of them. Exhibition slated for 2013.
What's on David Bowie's iPod? →
guardian.co.uk
And: “Why is Spotify not available in my country?”
Twitter Modern Classics →
twittermodernclassics.tumblr.com
Tweets you’d skim over suddenly become objects you’d pay for.
Slide Show: Luc Tuymans →
blogs.nybooks.com
Sanford Schwartz at the NYRblog.
“Here are some major recent developments in world hotspots that have gotten short shrift in the press in recent days.”
—Joshua Keating, “Checking in on the rest of the world,” FP Passport
“At best, the Obama administration will finish healthcare reform through parliamentary manoeuvres, and then move on to policies (such as stricter controls on banks) so popular that a few Republicans will have to support them: at worst, Congress will pass the annual budget, congratulate athletes, and do nothing else this year.”
—And all thanks to Massachusetts? Yes; as Stephen Burt explains in the London Review Blog, it’s not the state you probably think it is.
We Love You So has just posted three works by Henry Darger, and the moment the page loaded, one name came immediately to mind: Neo Rauch. I’ve known the work of both artists fairly well for some time, and it’s only now that I’ve made the association? It suddenly seems so obvious, and yet, googling around (and not digging too deeply, I’ll admit), I can only find one instance of an actual connection being made (besides a few artists including both names in lists of favorites and influences) - something called Club Art Diary back in 2005 on Darger: “You can see that a painter like Neo Rauch has seen his art, the colours, the spatial not-making-sense, and tarot card like landscapes are similar.” But surely more has been made of this elsewhere?
“When influential music website Pitchfork listed its 100 greatest albums of the 1970s – which in certain other lists is calculated to be the greatest decade for rock music – the modestly immodest, driven, musical non-musician Brian Eno was directly and indirectly involved in at least a quarter of them, including the number one, Low, on which he collaborated with a nomadic, post-‘Fame’ David Bowie and the producer Tony Visconti.”
—Paul Morley, introducing “On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno” in the Observer. Some of the snippets from the interview may already be familiar, but I’ll bet at least a few aren’t. I’m particularly amused that even Eno worries about mistaking U2 for Coldplay and/or the other way around. I’m also simply amazed by this little factoid up there - I did not know that this is how things would eventually pan out as we carry on tweaking our canons.
“So our job is to tell them: Be interested in what doesn’t interest you, make a decision about something you don’t care about, then act on it, vote. That’s a lot for a poster to accomplish. We’re successful because we know how to reduce information to the lowest level, so people respond without thinking. The message must go straight to the stomach, not to the brain, and connect with specific emotions involving fear, health, money, safety.”
—Alexander Segert, who oversaw the design of the poster for the Swiss People’s Party’s campaign to ban new minarets, in Michael Kimmelman’s piece on how the role of political posters is quite different in Europe than it is in the US.
Peter Hallward on ‘Our role in Haiti’s plight’ in the Guardian →
versouk.wordpress.com
And the New Left Review and the London Review of Books. Links and excerpts at Verso UK’s Blog. You knew there had to be a guilt trip to be taken in this catastrophe, and yes, there is, and yes, it is real.
“Note to Pat Robertson: Haiti is not a nation of Vodou practitioners. It is, and continues to be, overwhelmingly Christian.”
—Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, “‘Biblical’ Disaster: Understanding Religion in Haiti,” ReligionDispatches
Alright, another question. At BOMB, Jackie Saccoccio’s been asking painters, “What is the current state of abstraction?”
