glass cube

this is just nice
more info

when traveling to asia

fly ANA, it's cheap and fantastic! the food is great and the uniforms are professionally designed

new work from new rafael

www.jellotime.com

no mfa as mfa?

gavin turk famously for his mfa piece made a plaque dedicated to the memory of gavin turk memorializing the space in which gavin turk did his work. because he just made an empty room with a plaque, the RCA went into heated discussion about whether this is deserving of an mfa. half the professors wanted to fail him because he did nothing, the other half wanted to give him his mfa and said if they deny gavin turk his mfa, they will have to say no to others who did get their mfa because it would make a double standard.

now, the fact he didn't get his mfa and the controversies involved really gave him a kick start in his career. maybe controversial figures in the history of art was kicked out of an institution of some kind where their radical ideas were unaccepted.

now, can i turn not getting an mfa into art so i can get an mfa?
....

airplane!

i'm watching airplane!, you know, the 80s comedy. it's nice to look at a time where people still smoked on planes, kids can go up to cockpits, and the only thing people feared were the bad food

this is a nice way of saying something i hope most people know

"when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." Robert Pirsig

i'd also like to add: new delusions are always called cults first then religions

narnia vs. compass

i think it's funny how there's such an anger at the golden compass movie from the public because it sends a message about atheism to kids. but kids get force fed by religion all the time at every turn. the blame can not be placed upon the religious advocates really, it's just us atheists don't protest. but who cares, the more controversy, the more people pay attention to something. i think i should stop complaining about bad art, cause it just helps bad art.

i am a wiki-addict

i keep wasting time reading pointless articles about everything. you know that natural curiosity for new information? well, since the internet, all the information in the world are now at your fingertips. who care if it's all user generated and you can't trust anything, just reading small summaries about every interesting subject you want is just a click away. ultimate satisfaction for the curious with a severe case of ADD. who wants to learn in depth when you can learn a little in a short amount of time and then move onto something else that's interesting. that constant high you get from learning something new, just a little, a fact here, a fact there. soon, you realize you spent the last week doing nothing but reading wikipedia and following links to links to links . learning about how everything works and is connected. it is the collective knowledge of the world all summarized and cataloged, footnoted, and indexed.

so because of this... i plead... does anyone have any rideline, i am an addict and i really need help

a little reprive from art

so i've been noticing certain things about women that have been in my life lately, this might be true of all women, but since i do not exist as two separate persona, i can never confirm this.

you know the age old story, the bad boy comes to sweep away the good girl and they ride off into the sunset? the bad boy is corruption and the girl as purity and the corruption invades the pure (i sound like mary douglas now) but the corrupt is titillating, not just because of it's erotic nature of transgressions, but it offers the potential to clean the corruption, correct the wrong, strive towards perfection. we have such a strong culture of needing to clean the unclean, cleanliness is godliness right? we associate the polluted with the demonic and the clean with the angelic.
so if this is true, the girl then goes with the guy also as an urge to fix him to what is established to be normal, even though it is the transgression which caused the attraction in the first place. if this isn't common place, please correct me, but for me, i just see so many people trying to correct the dirtiness of others, striving for them to achieve some higher normalness that society dictates.
(as stated in a case which an african american woman was asked to change her hair to a more straighter style thus being more inline with a standard of aesthetic more representational of her working environment, a standard look for european woman hairstyles, but not african. thus pointing out the standard of normal beauty is completely western centric)
this eventually lead people to be unhappy, because we try to constantly correct each other.
now this isn't what i wanted to talk about, it was just a blurt.
i find it in some women i know, especially once case in particular, the reverse occurs. it is the holy man who is attracted to demonic vixen. now, i am not the holy man i speak of, i'm just talking about the people that are attracted by women i associate with. i am constantly hearing about these guys who thinks there is a "good side" to them, instead of appreciating them for who they are. these men think inside the tough exterior, there's a fluffy inside that is all good and nice and they are the holy men who can unlock the angel inside. too bad they soon find out what is inside is probably much worse than the outer persona (and we all wear our masks everyday) thus they get burned when they get too close. but there's one benefit from it, i hear about them and i get a good laugh....
haha

i really wish i understood french

for two specific reasons:

Berlioz & Melissa Theuriau

watch pushing daisies

ok, i actually really like this show, it's too awkward to not be enchanting

it's like amelie + sherlock holmes
i recommend it

jeff wall, rineke dijkstra, olafur eliasson, and more

currently, the SFMOMA has some wonderful pieces on display, it's really worth the 7 dollar student entrance fee. I want to point out some high lights

when you first come in, olafur eliasson drops a bombin the form of a wildly swinging fan attached to a secured rope. the simple fan, with no other robotic controls, just swings beautiful and wildly above your head, so close it tickles your hair.

his frozen car piece, your mobile experience, is such bullshit. i know he did it for the connections and the money. it's just bullshit. it pisses me off to even talk about it

his beauty piece, with a wall of water vapors pouring down is, of course, beautifulas you walk through the mist, the rainbow created by the fine water and a strong incandescent light really talks to the brilliance of what he does in seeing the beautiful in the simple

oh, his photographs suck, i mean, to show them in the same building as jeff wall or rineke dijkstra is just embarrassing.

the only other piece i really liked of his was the yellow mono spectrum room, a room completely filled with a narrow yellow light spectrum light so that everything you see becomes black and white. this is magic, but it's entertaining magic. i think if olafur were to become a magician, he should call him self, the magnificent eliasson. hell, i'd pay to see that

i was actually quite disappointed at the pieces, i liked his other pieces i've seen before so much more. the other pieces in the sfmoma that i don't write about are more mirror reflection pieces that really speak to his obsession with reflectivity and the infinite.

Jeff wall, well, it's jeff wall, and jeff wall speaks for himself, there's no reason to talk about it, or show you photographs of it, because reproductions of jeff wall pieces just, by far, do it no justice, so you have to see it for yourself to experience it.

rineke dijkstra... wow, her girl on the piece, to see it in person, is quite amazing
it's just amazing, she photographers her subjects while they wait to be photographed, and the images are just absolutely amazing. this one in particular, look at it for a bit, think, and see what the image reminds you of.
another bombshell is my personal favorite of all her work: the buzzclub, liverpool
a video of it can be found here
the piece just films people and what happens if you put a song on at a liverpool club, brilliant!

the douglas gordon show is ok, i like maybe 3 of his works alot, but only if you understand the video art people that preceded him cause it's mostly inside jokes.

joseph cornell... i just still don't get.

so yeah, great stuff
check it out

What is art

I had quite a severe discussion about this with someone who is absolutely not in the art related world today.

Some interesting discussion points:

what is art and what is not art? well, i guess this is the important question right? but isn't arguing whether something is art or not art just semantics? similarly to the argument of whether pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet. whether something is art or not does not change what it is, it does not make it any less of a thing or more. the label just allows a people to easily identify and categorize things around them. it's like trying to find a category for a non-existent idea (what is god? or what is sadness?). you just end up describe what is art by using art (like, how do you describe to a robot who does not know what happiness is without using arbitrary concepts that are so related to happiness that without experiencing happiness, one could never know). so thus, art is about art (recently i heard vasa use this phrase), is actually true! haha. art is everything that has been art before and discovering the new art.

ok, now that we established that arguing art is just semantics, then how do we deal with that knowledge? well, let's look at the institution of art. as with all disciplines, the people who are not in the discipline subscribe to the opinions of certain few who have been popularly elected (metaphorically) as filters of all that is in the discipline and those elected choose what to expose us to. these filters are curators, gallerists, and critics. just like the magazine SCIENCE or NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, we ask these people to filter the vastness of research and the new and ask them to tell us what, of all the discoveries, is really brilliant or great.

now with all institutes like this, there will be hesitation to radical new ideas. this is not new in the sciences or the art world. just as duchamp struggled against his peers to accept the fountain, galileo struggled against established perceptions. what always holds true is, this will change, and those who can not adapt get left behind. we are all here learning what has been discovered, and constantly discovering the new to either support or refute what we learned. this is just how progress works.

just like the sciences, art has an economic and political side. how do we judge good art? the same way good theories are judged: how influential are the ideas on the masses? when duchamp turned the urinal sideways and called it a fountain, if no one was influenced from this and art didn't change, it wouldn't be as important of a piece as it is now. thus, how much something is "art" is determined by how controversial it is. the more people talk, the more popular something is. i think this goes along with my saying: if everyone likes you work, you make good art, if everyone hates your work, you make bad art, if half of the people love your work, and the other hate, you make GREAT art. the more an art piece gets talked about the more interest it generates, the more fame, and thus the more value. if enough people follow the ideas behind the piece, then the piece becomes a classic, influential, and belongs in a museum for all to see and say: this is the point in time where everything changed.