A real product! I don't think they call it the pad potty. But this is probably the best non-art use for an iPad.
art as criticism
stephen westfall: spot the breakthrough
Am pretty well out of painting crit these days (life moves on except in this stodgy realm) but people keep posting links to NYC's equivalent of the medieval stonecutter's guild and its bible of sacred words. One of these is "breakthrough" and John Yau abuses hell out of it in this Hyperallergic review (or Hyperallergenic, as Salon once mistyped it).
Stephen Westfall has been making and exhibiting crisp, polished geometric-style paintings for three decades now. He bounces back and forth between iconic centralized images that could almost be corporate logos and more "allover" patterns where the eye is kept moving around a field. His most recent show contained both types, as likely will his next one, and the one after that. So it's spurious and ahistorical for Yau to take one of the "field" ones in a single show and pronounce it a breakthrough, with full late Greenberg orotundity.
If Westfall had a creative breakthrough it was when he went from whatever he was doing to the styles of paintings he's doing now, which was probably the mid-'80s.
Another kind of breakthrough would be if he left this groove and started doing something performative, or with computers. Or smartphone art.
Give it a rest, John Yau. Please don't ever write that "breakthrough" review again.
glucose, fat, salt, citric acid, war dead
Twitter screenshot (if that's not obvious).
Remembering the tragedy of Pearl Harbor with SpaghettiOs apparently isn't a joke. Fortunately aFriendlyB is on it.
Have been tweeting for 5.5 years now and am starting to dread what appears in my timeline -- of a promoted, commercial nature. It is amusing to surf around the legions of twitterers with joke names who don't take it seriously on any level, however. Trivial, maybe, but not toxically trivial on the order of a pasta toroid hoisting an American flag.
us chamber freudian slip
The US Chamber of Commerce, normally not known for spreading global warming awareness, shows the predicted water level in Chicago by the year 2050 in the twitter post below. "Mark Twain," according to Wikipedia, refers to "the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms."
But seriously, Twitter doesn't quite have this "inline image" thing down yet. It auto-crops images appended to tweets rather than shrinking them, resulting in unintentional droll humor such as the removal of the Mark Twain quote in the above example.