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And so there is an eye staring back at you from the beginning of this exhibition, an apt figure for work that rigorously explores how, if we can briefly interrupt the unconscious act of seeing, the eye works in myriad complicated and dizzying ways. Many prints explore ideas related to mapping, reductionist and appealing surfaces that organize space in congenial ways. Others carefully balance elements (a coffee tin filled with paint brushes, a wood-grain pattern, a background of color crosshatches) in such a way that the eye is uncertain whether to read them “up” or “down,” to inflate the visual code into a fully three-dimensional representation, or dematerialize anything “real” in them and let the image be all jazz and color on the surface.
Source: Washington Post
A more inquiring appraisal suggests that although his aesthetic effect was rich, his stock of events was thin. In a fictional texture featuring a sore tooth and a fleeting kiss as important strands Zen diaphanousness always threatened. (What is the sound of one flower being arranged?)
Source: clivejames.com
Video reblogged from Storyboard with 114 notes
“I don’t know that I would say the morgue is a diamond in the rough. I might say it’s a rough in the rough. It’s as unpolished as the world we have now, and that’s what makes it valuable. We can turn to it for a reminder that we’re not living a life for the first time: we’ve been here before.”—David Dunlap, NYT reporter
Inside the New York Times “Lively Morgue”
Print archives that were once the heart of many newspapers have gone the way of the floppy disk. But at the New York Times, home to the Lively Morgue Tumblr, the technology that’s threatened to kill the morgue may also save it. We went inside the morgue to find out what all the fuss was about. Read the accompanying feature.
Source: storyboard
[I]t’s music you dislike in theory and get off on in fact that keeps you growing—everything else is spiritual maintenance.
Source: robertchristgau.com
Locked in the ‘sour and unwelcoming’ building, where nothing looks ‘as if it had been put down for a few minutes and was waiting to be picked up again’….
Making [an experience] seem beautiful is a little more than just prettying it up. In fact it’s something much more than that. It’s trying to make it acceptable…[and] most truths are unpalatable. You know what a boa constrictor does if it has something to eat that’s unpalatable? It sort of covers it with the boa constrictor equivalent of saliva until it can slide down easily. Well, I think that’s really what I mean by beautifying. If you have a rough truth like ‘life is first boredom then fear’ you’ve got to somehow bring the reader’s mind round to the point where that is the only possible exit from this particular situation. That’s what I mean by making it beautiful. It’s like Shakespeare making _King Lear_ beautiful. _King Lear_ is beautiful but it’s very painful.
“There is an entirely different order of product being developed here, far beyond the outer reaches of irony. I first started seeing them in Google Image searches; the most random queries were returning pictures of t-shirts, trucker hats, and especially ties that were truly uncanny. One could not, by looking at them, decipher how they had come about, what possible thought process lay behind them, who they were for, or why anyone would want them. They had something akin to the lost-in-translation weirdness of Chinese Shanzhai culture, but what was being lost was in a language far more distant than Chinese; one got the impression the “designers” of these pieces were speaking strictly in ones and zeros. I had visions of design-bots, data mining for user patterns, instantaneously designing products based on trending search queries, generating t-shirts like predictive text and graphics through some kind of visual auto-tune. Amazingly, it turns out I am not totally wrong.” Babak Radboy, Spam-erican Apparel: Do Androids dream of ironic tees? DIS, n.d.
Source: dismagazine.com
When I think of spiritual traditions, I think about the story that I heard about Baal Shem Tov, who’s the person who ended up creating Hasidic culture. He was walking with an Orthodox rabbi and—I may be butchering the story a bit—they were walking together and there was a guy who had on his prayer robe, his prayer clothes, on, and he was on his hands and knees washing his wagon wheel, and his prayer shawl was getting dirty. The Orthodox rabbi was like, ‘Oh, what has it come to that these people are doing these mundane, dirty chores while wearing the sacred and ceremonial robes?’ And Baal Shem Tov’s response was ‘How incredible is it that, even while this person is washing his wagon, he’s praying?’
Elaine Blair, "Great American Losers"—NYR Blog →
Misandry as a symptom of misogyny.
Russell Baker, Why Being Serious is Hard—NYT Magazine →
Acting dignified is solemn. Being solemn is serious.
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