“In an age of avatars and digitally altered profile photos, endlessly falsified and therefore perfectible online personas, we are all invited to construct ourselves closer to what we dream of being than what we simply are. Authenticity has becomes a slippery and evasive promise, and we too are becoming constructs, selves-that-are-not-actually-ourselves.”
—“Open Secrets: Literature as Gossip in the Digital Age” on The New Inquiry (via britticisms)
October 2010
95 posts
“At its best, Tumblr is to blogging what sleepwalking is to walking. That’s my personal use of the site, and not the only way either. Revealing influences is the confidence of a true creative person: you can see where the ideas come from, because even with the same ingredients I know you can’t bake what I’m about to with it. And of course I’m avoiding the world curation right now. ”
—
Joanne McNeil, “Just Tumbling,” Tomorrow Museum.
(I have a slavish-stalkerish love for the way Joanne McNeil writes about online discourse).
Garage-Sale Ghouls: America's Creepiest Finds - Newsweek →
newsweek.com
Ooh! Or should I say, boo! (cringe). An article featuring one of my favorite websites/collections, the Brooklyn-based Morbid Anatomy, from Newsweek!
In late October, millions adorn their homes with replicas of disembodied heads, or hang bloodied scarecrows by the neck from the branches of trees. White picket fences become cemetery gates, and nice suburban parents smile as their children ramble around miniature graves, sucking on Jell-O shaped like brains.
Artifice is one thing. But some people, either by accident or design, find themselves in possession of much more macabre objects than plastic Halloween decorations. This week a woman shopping at Goodwill found a lovely oak box that when opened, revealed what appeared to be human remains. (Goodwill says it has received urns in the past, which are usually marked with the name of the mortuary where the remains were cremated. In those cases, Goodwill returns the ashes to the mortuary..).
“Slow Blogging is a response to and a rejection of Pagerank. Pagerank, the ugly-beautiful monster that sits behind the many folded curtains of Google, deciding the question of authority and relevance to your searches. Blog early, blog often, and Google will reward you. Condition your creative self to the secret frequency, and find yourself adored by Google; you will appear where everybody looks – in the first few pages of results. Follow your own pace and find your works never found; refuse Pagerank its favours and your work is pulled as if by riptide into the deep waters of undifferentiated results. Its twisted idea of the common good has made Pagerank a terrifying enemy of the commons, setting a pace that forbids the reflection that is necessary to move past the day to day and into legacy.”
—
Todd Sieling, Manifesto for Slow Blogging.
Wow, this whole thing is brilliant and totally makes me check myself. It’s pretty antithetical to the whole Tumblr ethos, but there’s room for both Tumblr and slow blogging in a person’s life, I think. Maybe. Maybe not? Regardless, I need to move back towards the latter approach.
“Which leads me to suppose that perhaps the most important thing is that these structures exist, that they encourage the self to go beyond the self and in doing so, develop awareness of the self within a context of others.”
—
Caroline Picard, “The Existential Crisis of APT Galleries and Art”
http://lanternprojects.com/daily/?p=7832
(via sidecargallery)
I think James Franco is the new Ethan Hawke. I remember back when Ethan Hawke sorta mattered he used to do artsy kinds of things that didn’t quite fit into the movie star mold and he, too, tended to be ridiculed by others for his pretensions. Whatever. Who cares about James Franco. Hey read this:
Rant of the Week: Don Draper’s Imaginary Decision Considered Objectively →
ludicdespair.blogspot.com
I am always on the lookout for good rants, but lots of the best ones aren’t contemporary art-related and thus aren’t appropriate for posting on Bad at Sports. Although its author, Jeffrey Sconce, might disagree with my labeling this post as a rant, I think it does qualify, mostly for wicked funny passages like this one:
If you want to get angry, get angry that anyone had to make a “choice” of any kind in this scenario. Mad Men is politically “bad” in some sense because it paired Don with the young French hottie over the age-appropriate professional peer, and yet there is little interrogation as to the imperative of heteronormative monogamy that demands Don must legally pair up with something in a skirt by season’s end. If one is going to play the weird game of judging fake people living in cartoons of distant historical eras by the yardstick of contemporary gender politics, shouldn’t we be more riled by the unexamined logic that all of them—Don, Megan, and Faye—can only be happy if they get married and squirt out a few more Nassau County trust fund kids for the 1980s?
Hah. And the post is long and kind of crazy-rambling, which also puts it into the rant category. Don’t get me wrong: it’s incredibly well-written and very, very funny; an all-around good piece of television/cultural critique. I do enjoy my regular doses of Ludic Despair. If you’ve read this far, click the link above and go read the whole piece!
Michael Darling, Michelle Grabner and Lane Relyea: Home Base — On the Make →
onthemake.org
From On the Make:
What does it mean to characterize an artist by where they live and work? And similarly, what does it mean for a collection to be of a place—to reflect a museum’s history and artistic community, to be shaped by the dynamics of a city, to be used by and be seen as part of the locale where it lives?
The MCA’s new James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator Michael Darling, artist and writer Michelle Grabner, and critic Lane Relyea delve into these questions, looking at examples from the United States and internationally. A book signing of the just-released publication Can I Come Over to Your House? The First Ten Years of The Suburban follows the talk. The book features essays by Forrest Nash and Michael Newman. Design by Jason Pickleman.
