79 posts tagged with art by chavenet.
Displaying 1 through 50 of 79.
Another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission
Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated (‘perfed’) and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and ’90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD’s spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as ‘commercial tokens’. from Acid media [Aeon; ungated]
By default art involves artifice
A comedian’s only responsibility is to make the audience laugh. If you’re not making the audience laugh, then you’re failing at your job. You want to speak truth to power, you want to make a political statement, you want to be confessional—none of that is more or less valid than doing ventriloquism or doing an impression of Christopher Walken. They’re all equal, so long as they make people laugh. If it’s more important to you to do something that doesn’t make the audience laugh, fine, but it’s not comedy. It’s something else. from Two Guys Walk into a Bar: Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy [The Sun Magazine]
My life has gone off the map, it seems. Possibly also off the rails.
At the frame shop there is so much beauty, it can’t be real. Maybe this is the afterlife, I think. Or purgatory. ... When my boss stomps up from his frame-building cellar and sees me, he always barks: Are you still here? Which is literal, because I’m new and only working part time, but also existential because how am I still here—or back here? It’s been a year since I returned to Chicago, but it still doesn’t feel like real life from Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife by Wendy Brenner [Oxford American; ungated]
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled
Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing by John Berger is a seminal work which examines how we view art.
The head on the car is a dream
Those seams we are seduced into not seeing
Let me offer a couple examples of how the arts challenge AI. First, many have pointed out that storytelling is always needed to make meaning out of data, and that is why humanistic inquiry and AI are necessarily wed. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles (2021: 1605) writes, interdependent though they may be, database and narrative are “different species, like bird and water buffalo.” One of the reasons, she notes, is the distinguishing example of indeterminacy. Narratives “gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and embrace the ambiguity, while “databases find it difficult to tolerate”. from Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?
“They’re noticeably different, except for a few”
Meanwhile, Rybak and Hearn say that prospective buyers regularly call or email asking for guidance in authenticating this or that painting, worried they may have sunk large sums of money on worthless imitations. Some buyers were bilked out of their life savings. For the fraudsters, of course, the scheme was nothing more than a way to make money. But the devastation to honest buyers, to Morrisseau and his legacy, to Indigenous culture, and to Canadian art writ large is incalculable. Morrisseau’s works were not meaningless paintings but precious, irreplaceable examples of the Anishinaabe experience in Canada and the world. from Inside the Biggest Art Fraud in History [Smithsonian]
A Moby Dick Pro-leg-omenon (But which?)
Captain Ahab’s ivory leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, stands as one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in all of literature. Draw a man with a peg leg next to whale and he’s instantly recognizable as Ahab, as is the general idea of what happened to the leg and the less than amicable relationship he has with that whale. It’s all in the leg; and the leg tells the whole story. Which is why it’s so maddening, so confounding, that although Melville provides the minutest details about every last person, animal, and object in Moby-Dick, he fails to tell us which leg Ahab is missing. from Ahab's Leg Dilemma: Part 1, Part 2
Everyone deserves a good death
I am an artist, and I am a death doula. Part of working with and supporting those who are grieving or dying means that you know how precious and short this life is. You don’t take it for granted and you try not to let small things stop you from taking your dreams seriously every day. That is the phenomenal up side of doing deathwork: it makes me a courageous artist, for whom it’s easier not to compare myself to anyone else, or say that I am not artist enough, and encourages me to exist in the only timeline that matters — mine. from The Importance of Art in a “Good Death” by Brianna L. Hernández in Hyperallergic [CW: death and dying] [more inside]
Weird Trumps
This belief in tarot as a revealer of hidden truths is not the survival of some ancient tradition. It’s a modern idea grafted on to something that was originally intended as a bit of fun. Tarot was a card game played in a fairly recognisable way, with the players laying down a card to compete for the highest value in a series of tricks – but with 20 or so ornate picture cards, depending on the set, to complicate the scoring. These were so beautifully crafted, so visually splendid, that their designs now obsess and befuddle people centuries after it was first played by Renaissance courtiers. But tarot is no more mysterious in its origins than Happy Families. from Dr Terror deals the Death card: how tarot was turned into an occult obsession [Grauniad; ungated] [more inside]
To think of fanzines is to think of our younger, stumblebum selves
Zines, at their most glorious, are indifferent to dignity, reckless in the statements they reel off, determined to make a virtue of their limited resources. Back in 1978, the editors of a book called Copyart likened the photocopier to a “magical machine,” something that produced the “unplanned” and “unexpected.” All the magic in Copy Machine Manifestos is from another time, another country. from Copy Machine Manifestos
There are pieces here only a billionaire could acquire
It is a coup then for the Tate to show such extraordinary (and extraordinarily expensive) pieces, and undoubtedly a benefit to the gallery-going public. A closer look at Gregor Muir’s job description reveals an emphasis not on curating, but on directorship of Tate’s international collection, which encompasses “[nurturing] and [expanding] the Tate’s existing international networks including the established acquisitions committees.” The show’s collaboration demonstrates success in this respect. Yet it sets a worrying precedent, especially given what feels like a lack of transparency into the monied roots of the show. from What We Lose When Curating Follows the Money
“Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista (Podría ser Juliana)”
Upon entering the show, the consistent orange and golden hues of her paintings set the room aglow. A few of her subjects’ faces, inlayed with mother-of-pearl, catch the light like flecks of the moon. The paintings beckon us to plunge into their vaporous worlds while challenging us to decode intricate scenarios. from Remedios Varo in a Sphere of Her Own [hyperallergic] [more inside]
You were looking, O king, and lo! there was a great statue
It has struck me lately that the recurrent frenzy of destruction of prized objects in popular culture may tell us less about our current relationship to the past than it does about our fears for the future. After all, each effort a culture makes to preserve an object of admiration involves a wager about how later generations will need access to material that is already in some measure outmoded. If every museum may be understood to indicate something about what a culture anticipates or hopes will happen in the years ahead, to depend on a secular prophesy of value, the loss of protection, the acceptance of injury, even the cheerful anticipation of acts of violence may in turn need to be understood to be forceful indications of fundamental changes in values. from In The Age of Artpocalypse; Beauty and Damage on TV
A Glimpse of What Might Have Been
It’s curious that fiction’s decoupling from what Shields called the “burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened”—or what the German sociologist of economics Jens Beckert calls the “doubling of reality”—is simultaneous with financial markets’ embrace of the unreal. Especially since it wasn’t always this way. The story of these divergent literary and financial trends starts in the Eighties and Nineties, back when fiction was still fiction, and finance was still math. from Double Reality, Hedging the Novel in the Postfictional Age by Jessi Jezewska Stevens [The Point; ungated]
I Like Nearly Everyone I Meet
Deliberate Isolation in a Crowd
Critically, the bench is classless. Particularly a park bench. From well-dressed ladies to homeless men, from horny teens to elderly people-watchers and pigeon-feeders, they come out to just be in the world a little. It exemplifies a certain kind of publicness, a truly democratic intervention and a place to be private in public, a small space in the melee of the metropolis where it is acceptable to do nothing, to consume nothing, to just be. Truly, a free bench is a wonderful thing. from A Place of Both Solitude and Belonging: In Praise of the Park Bench
“What do you want from the Artist?”
The encounter, and much of the text of Working Girl, suggests the appeal or even the revolutionary potential of relating in such an upfront, contractual manner: that there might even be a cleansing element to addressing things in such blatant terms, equity in considering one’s time worth good money, and asking for it, especially in the contexts of the art world and sex industry, when participants often harbor vast wealth. from Working It by Kate Wolf [more inside]
Trompe Dubreuil
After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks are evaluated anew by Dorinda Evans, who considers Dubreuil’s unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time. from Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies [more inside]
One of the Most Ardently Reviled Films Ever Made
There is something moving about Negovan’s quest to honour McDowell’s performance. There’s not much the recut can do about the script and iffy camerawork, which are all part of the charm. But Negovan has unearthed a much clearer sense of a character arc, from Caligula as wary young man genuflecting to the mad emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, on wonderful form), to a joyful freshly minted tyrant, through to the increasing cruelty and disintegration of his reason as he is driven mad by power. from
‘An irresistible mix of art and genitals’: Caligula finally comes to Cannes [Grauniad] [CW: not really safe for work] [more inside]
The Day Job Has Been a Generative Force in U.S. Art
In the end, the art in Day Jobs is not demystified by its source material as much as the day jobs are remystified by artistic success. The only way for this effect not to have occurred might have been to show unfinished, unrealized, or nonexistent art: what artists couldn’t quite bring to completion, or couldn’t even start, because they were too busy with, or tired from, their jobs. But no one wants to see that, no matter how much more representative it might be. from The Art of Work by Megan Marz
Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Humphrey Bogart
In other words, this isn’t the most obvious foursome to occupy a painted, nostalgic eternity together. But now, ironically, thanks to these ubiquitous paintings, Monroe, Dean, Presley, and Bogart seem forever inseparable. So who decided on this grouping, and why? The answer is comically, unnecessarily complex. from The Hopper-Consani Connection [The Believer; ungated]
"How much time is it going to take to wade through this?"
"The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered." from Information Overload by Claire Bishop [ArtForum; ungated]
AI-hab: All My Means Are Sane, My Motive and My Object Mad
A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself? from Chaos Bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI by Eigil zu Tage-Ravn
The Facts Are Not in Dispute
Spirituality is a Spandrel
The desire for connection and belonging, to nature and to other people; the feeling of being part of something larger than ourselves; the appreciation of beauty; the experience of awe—all are byproducts of other traits that had evolutionary benefit. Another aspect of spirituality is “the creative transcendent,” a name I give to that exhilarating, soaring sensation when we produce something new in the world, discover something new, find ourselves in a state of pure seeing. Painters, musicians, dancers, novelists, scientists, and all of us have experienced the creative transcendent. from The Spiritual Materialist by Alan Lightman [Nautilus; ungated]
Bad Mary
The Ability to Find Beauty in Unpromising Places
The Cube is Not Solid All the Way Through: It Has a Hollow Core
Gen-U-Inly Superficial
I let my gaze rest on the pink ends of her two-tone hair, before moving down towards her very toned forearms, every inch of which were covered in the same sort of tattoos as Diego’s were. If it hadn’t been for Luis, I would have assumed that she was queer, not only because this appeared to be the one culture that it still seemed okay to appropriate, but also because she looked as if she might actually sleep with women. Then, I looked at Luis. He too was covered in tattoos, and although clearly not a cowboy he wore such incredibly high, pointed cowboy boots that he walked with even more of a swish than our barman: a moustachioed guy in hot-pants and a gold chain that spelled out ‘A-N-A-L’. And yet in spite, or more likely because of, these very particular and completely on-trend ambiguities the four of us blended perfectly together. from an extract from the upcoming book The Jacques Lacan Foundation by Susan Finlay
Before The Fictional Artist Inevitably Burns Out He's Always Fading Away
That writing fiction may finally be incompatible with adequately describing a work of art is the worry that shadows many of these novels. But, like Bergotte’s dying realization, they also suggest that the knowledge of this shortcoming is what makes writing worthwhile. From The Lives and Deaths of Fictional Artists by Sam Thorne
I Would Like You to be Pleased with the Idea
After introducing himself, [Jasper] Johns told [Jéan-Marc] Togodgue about a decision he had made that would forever link the 91-year-old, Georgia-born art legend with the 17-year-old student and basketball standout. It would also spark a legal dispute — eventually settled — as well as raise questions about how artists use other people’s works to create their own. from How did this teenager’s drawing of his knee wind up in a Jasper Johns painting at the Whitney? [WP; archive] [more inside]
Phwoart!
Pornhub has just launched a museum guide for classical nudes [TimeOut] but then the
Louvre Calls in Lawyers Over Pornhub’s Hardcore Re-Enactments [Daily Beast] [more inside]
Io Sono
The “sculpture” is intended to be displayed in a 5×5-foot square and must be displayed in a private space free from obstructions where lighting and climate control are not required. Reiterating that even if you can’t see it, it does exist, Garau included a certificate of authentication to the purchaser. Italian Artist Salvatore Garau Has Just Sold an Invisible Sculpture for $18,000 USD
The Hater Box
Voluntarily provocative, The Hater Box transforms the principle of old split flap displays into a random generator of contestations, cold and impersonal. [Parse/Error] [more inside]
Flim is the Thing
Flim is a movie search engine currently in beta that returns screenshots from movies based on keywords. [Via Kottke & Boing Boing & Recomendo]
Algonuts
Certain artists are highly productive and constrain themselves to a particular style and format for their entire careers. Charles Shulz, the creator and artist of the Peanuts comic strip, produced thousands of comics over 50 years. As a result, he is one of the few artists who have enough ‘content’ to train a styleGAN2 model. By extracting each frame from nearly 18,000 comic strips I was able to harvest 63,800 distinct images featuring Charlie, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty and the rest of the gang – plenty of food for the network to chew on. Several hundred hours of computational time later, a network containing the ‘visual DNA’ of Peanuts emerged.
Starving Artist
"The banana is the idea": Performance Artist Eats $120,000 Banana Off Wall at Art Basel Gallery [Daily Beast] [more inside]
Drink Another, Coin a Phrase
Can you draw a perfect circle?
Stop Player, Joke #4
As the perforated rolls of the player piano prefigured the punch cards of early computing, so, too, have they shaped how we talk about creative machines. Like the ghostly hands that played upon pianola keys, AI art stokes deep cultural anxieties about the risks automation poses to human activity. Ultimately, we fear that they will replace us, whether at the factory or at the canvas. From Ghost Hands, Player Pianos, and the Hidden History of AI by Vanessa Chang [LARB] [more inside]
Not Surprisingly, the Art Industry is Fighting the Regulations
After a slew of recent cases in the United States and Europe, the momentum toward a crackdown on illicit art and antiquities deals is growing. The legitimate art market is itself enormous—estimated at $67.4 billion worldwide at the end of 2018. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the underground art market, which includes thefts, fakes, illegal imports, and organized looting, may bring in as much as $6 billion annually. The portion attributed to money laundering and other financial crimes is in the $3 billion range. The Art of Money Laundering by Tom Mashberg for the IMF
“Lust, plain and simple—if lust were ever simple.”
...these books are artifacts. There is every sort of forbidden subject in forbidden books, what was then illicit sex, but also, all things taboo—drugs, various subcultures, descriptions of parts of cities there was no reason to go to otherwise. There is an honesty that rises from there being little reason for lying: emotional states, cultural criticism about art and politics at the time of the writing, blind items, gossip, maps—the stuff we call today “creative nonfiction” ... These books served as community. My First Library Was a Library of Porn by Brian Bouldrey [NSFW text] [more inside]
What, Me Worry?
There Was No Hierarchy Amongst the Materials
“Go Ahead,” She Said. “Take It.” So He Did.
In the annals of art crime, it's hard to find someone who has stolen from ten different places. By the time the calendar flips to 2000, by Breitwieser's calculations, he's nearing 200 separate thefts and 300 stolen objects. For six years, he's averaged one theft every two weeks. One year, he is responsible for half of all paintings stolen from French museums. The Secrets of the World's Greatest Art Thief [more inside]
Beat The Devil Out Of It
46 minutes of Bob Ross beating the devil out of it, redecorating his living room, covering everybody in the studio, taking out his hostilities, just enjoying the best part of painting. [Digg] [YouTube] [more inside]
Everything That Belonged to Us is Coming Back
The full scale of the criminality is impossible to pinpoint, because many heists never make the headlines ... But the thefts that were made public bear striking similarities. The criminals are careful and professional. They often seem to be working from a shopping list—and appear content to leave behind high-value objects that aren't on it. In each case, the robbers focused their efforts on art and antiquities from China, especially items that had been looted by foreign armies. Many of these objects are well documented and publicly known, making them very hard to sell and difficult to display. In most cases the pieces have not been recovered; they seem to simply vanish. The Great Chinese Art Heist by Alex W. Palmer [SLGQ]
A Wonderful Exercise in Absurdism
A Work of Art by Janet Malcolm [SLNYRB]
First Impressions
“First Impressions” consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017, all of which are cited below. After collecting every first sentence, I found they fell into a number of patterns, some surprising, others obvious: points of view, different tenses, genre fiction like western and military, stories set in smalltown America, stories set in Montana (oddly there were a lot), etc. I then arranged these patterns into a sequence of vignettes, a short story in its own right. A story by by Tom Comitta
Ugly Medieval Cats
The bad looking cats of classical painting [Content warning: Ugly is in the eye of the beholder] [more inside]
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