tom moody

GIF pair by Illalli

From Naked Capitalism:

But this is a vastly bigger leak, and most important, the Gulf is not Alaska. The visibility is vastly higher, more people are affected, as are more governors, senators, and representatives. And Obama appears to be laying the groundwork to demand that BP pay not just cleanup costs, but the full cost of the damage wrought. From an economic standpoint, this is sound: the problem with “externalities” or costs of a product that are foisted on innocent bystanders is that the people who suffer seldom can recover their losses. So the parties to the product sale get an artificial subsidy (the product is provided for a cost lower than its true, fully loaded cost to society) which they somehow divide up between them.

[...]

I wouldn’t be optimistic; Team Obama has yet to rough up anyone. But this particular set of circumstances – a monstrous disaster that is not going to be resolved anytime soon and a rich, unpopular, and relatively isolated target – will show whether Obama’s survival instincts will overcome his deep seated deference to corporate chieftans.

Recently artist Marina Abramović did a performance piece at the Museum of Modern Art where museumgoers lined up to sit in a chair and stare at her for an undetermined length of time (as long as they wanted or, from what friends say who followed it closely, until they upstaged the artist with aberrant behavior and were hustled away by museum guards).

A writer for the Antiwar.com blog has a slightly different take on Marina Abramović than that of the typical jaded art person in New York. While the latter might see her as the owner of two handsome dwellings feted in the New York Times home-and-garden section, thrower of fab Soho parties and orchestrator of new media three-ring entertainments, the former takes at face value that she is a shamanic martyr figure, and roots the pain-and-endurance aspect of her work in her earlier life experience as a Serb and refugee from Communism:

The artist’s influences are chiefly the air of Yugoslav nationalism in the postwar years — both parents were popular WWII figures; her great uncle was the patriarch of the Serbian Church — and the stark and dreary oppression of Tito’s communist regime. Abramović came of age under this anti-individualist orthodoxy; might this lead one to experiment further with self-denial, self-imposed stress positions — a popular tool in the torturer’s repertoire — and self-inflicted pain?

This rhetorical question presented in the interests of fairness and balance.

Added this photo to a post from 8 years ago called "Creepy Clown and New Media."
That mini-essay covered the "stalker collage" and other artistic crowdsourcing phenomena (although the word crowdsourcing didn't exist then). Many of the links are dead but the argument still flies, I think:

Like Creepy Clown, the Tourist Guy is usually a silent, passive witness to some activity, and the chemistry between his cigar store Indian placidity and rambunctious scenes of murder and violence is often hilarious. And once again, anyone with Photoshop could make a "Tourist Guy" masterpiece. This is [the] real New Media art...

Meaning the "street" had already trumped the "top down" concepts of the new media panels of the day such as:

Database Cultures in Collaboration: Panelists discuss the challenges of using databases as the generative engines behind their art work, creating alternative systems that reveal the poetic, metaphoric, critical, and community-building possibilities of manipulating and reconstituting data.

An image of Jeff Koons' sculpture appears as Google's background today (hat tip Paddy Johnson).
Two comments: (i) What is Google thinking? and (ii) Koons is starting to look more and more like Dale Chihuly.

Update: The Koons is gone--guess it was just momentary, to plug Google's customizable home page crapola.