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art as criticism
stolen citibike
A popular photo from the NY police department twitter feed is this stolen and pitifully repainted Citibike. OK, that's funny but let's look for a metaphor here.
Citibike, a branded entity that essentially greenwashes a bailed-out megabank, isn't paying for itself and is now asking for a bailout from NYC public moneys.
The designer of the bike is in bankruptcy because of funds withheld by Citibike, allegedly because of software glitches in the platform.
The alleged bike thief is a 68 year old man. What if, like the desperate character in the film The Bicycle Thief, he had his own bike stolen and was absolutely dependent on cycling for a livelihood, in a hardass town where banks and greenwashers get help and regular citizens are kicked into the gutter?
Who is laughing now? Of course, stealing is wrong.
This could also be bad performance art.
untitled head arrangement
from the tumblr of ckcker
At the risk of spoiling a good joke by analyzing it, this sequence of five found photos encapsulates the tragedy and stupidity of our silicon valley-made, plato's caveman world. The randomness of image search meets clickbait buttonpushing mechanics, hollowing out the already hollowed out. There is a kind of algebra, or set theory, at work here: three images of cheapened sadness (the abashed celebrity at the moment of crisis), fear (the bloody hollywood FX head), and yuks (the parked domain meme reenactment), forming an emotional triad that must be offset by not one, but two, creepy goalie masks in order for layout feng shui to be achieved.
other people's thoughts on facebook jonesin'
1. Rene Abythe shows us in graphic form what is happening in the brain of the painter with the Facebook open studio that we ridiculed in the previous post (click image for full-size version, previously posted on dump.fm):
2. From wierdnumber: "[science fiction] lampoon of the idea of a 'like economy' though the site which hosts it is quick to follow it with a 'like this on facebook' button"
3. From Miracle Jones' short story "Ladykiller":
[a man talking to his fiancee] "We are gonna talk about Facebook in the future like our parents talk about cocaine," he said. "Man, I can’t even remember that decade. I was on Facebook the whole time. I met your mother on Facebook. I did so much Facebook that my balls went numb and I could only fuck on Facebook. You want to see pictures? They are on Facebook."
the generator and the flowers
None of Mondrian's paintings done in the "mature" late style were landscape orientation (all were portrait, square or diamond) so the true shitty mondrian generator would want to start there.
The "maturity" of that late work got me thinking about Mondrian's flower paintings and drawings, which he continued doing while he was making the primary colored rectangles. Legend has it he made these as his bread and butter since the rectangles weren't selling. I have always perversely wanted to see a retrospective that hung the artist's works in strict chronological order, to explode the myth of his development as a Modernist. (Suffice it to say the last one I saw at MOMA didn't do that.)
Even accomplishing that would be tricky, because many of the flowers aren't dated, or were clumsily back-dated by the artist to preserve the myth of his abandonment of naturalism.
While pondering this I found an obsessive Mondrian fetish site that has scans of all the flowers and all the late paintings grouped by color. Caution, this site is waa-a-ay pre-social media, with Comic Sans lettering and crisp HTML borders floating over a hideous textured yellow background.