dump.fm was making new digital pogs yesterday. (there are now many more new ones than in the original group from 4 years ago.) above are some of mine; all were done since May 2010, except the purple spiral molecule. A horizontal grid of these makes a better arrangement. [more background from lalblog on the original group; looking forward to an eventual large page of dump.fm pogs]
Update: Here is the dump pog page (mildly NSFW).
A few days ago Google ran a full-bleed image of a Jeff Koons installation shot as one if its joky seasonal page styles. Or so it seemed--more likely it was to plug its new customizable home page but a few seconds' googling to confirm this is time too precious to waste. At any rate, immediate catcalls, hoo-hawing, and wtfs from the socialmediasphere possibly caused the image's rather sudden disappearance. Again, pure speculation and a more commercially responsible blogger would check. Mentioned it here but had not thought to save the image, assuming it would be up for the rest of the day rather than a few hours. Hat tip to John Transue for finding the above and posting it to dump.fm.
As noted in the earlier post, Koons is looking more and more like blown-glass artist Dale Chihuly these days. Chihuly is schlock thinking it's art as opposed to Koons' art thinking about schlock but what happens when you can barely tell the difference? Made this mock-up to show the comparison, and offer another possible search page "theme":
For the record, Koons did interesting work up to about the first flower puppy, a sculpture that was made in Germany in a year he was not included in Documenta as a kind of petulant, salon-des-how-dare-you-refuse-me gesture. His peak was probably the "banalities" show of the late '80s, when he hired italian woodcarver/polychromers to make large-scale sculptures of pure commercial kitsch (Michael Jackson with chimp, Pink Panther with babe, Popples-brand teddy bear with bird, etc). Since then he has been cranking out metallic balloon-animal sculptures as "plop art" (to be plopped into public plazas--get it?), which are passably compelling, as well as pseudo-Rosenquist collage paintings that are impossible to look at, and not in a good way.
Update: Have been told Google has Chihuly search page templates so I didn't have to make a crapp(ier) one. OK, duly noted.
Update 2: Jeez, did not say Google had "permanently taken down" the Koons - none of the seasonal crap lasts more than a day but it's usually up more than a few hours. Must everything be spelled out in a blog post? And why am I on twitter, please? (OK, many of the @s are great and informative - still feeling commenterphobic I guess. Should be more tolerant of argumentative ignorati.)
Update 3: Need to "work through" this blogger tantrum. The post above says: (i) the Koons page was taken down by Google more quickly than its usual Thanksgiving turkey-style joke page; (ii) many socialmediasphere commenters thought the page was crap; and (iii) i did no research to find out if the two were connected but assumed they were for purposes of getting in some gratuitous digs at all parties. Honestly, I don't really care about Google or its attempts to build buzz for its new roll-out. Am interested, however, in how the art world and tech world rub against each other (usually with bad results). Although I don't have comments turned on, people sought me out through other soc-med channels (dump.fm and twitter) to tell me that the Chihuly and the Koons pages were readily available if you want a crap search page (OK, they didn't say the last part.) One of the commenters had previously sung the praises to me, in Paddy Johnson's blog comments, of Google's "similar image" function, which I think is dorky. It's hard to know if everyone in the world is working for Sergey Brin (a la pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or if they just love him so darn much.
Practitioner of "capitalist realism," a German take on Pop, who remained consistently inventive throughout a long career. A great improviser, he could filigree a found image or scrap of material with acres of irrelevant but intricate scribbling. Cartoony work such as the above showed his attachment to "bad art"; in that sense he is a successor to Picabia and father to Mike Kelley. A running theme was degraded reproduction and enlarged photo grain became a signature for him the way Ben Day dots were for Roy Lichtenstein. Consistently overlooked and underrated was Polke's photographic work: largely impenetrable groupings of serial out-of-focus black and white imagery taped casually to mounting board. He will be greatly missed.
One of the better online archives of his work (all prints).
