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Cross posted to Nasty Nets, where joel posted some slightly-out-of-phase, marquee-scrolling shockwave files and a graphic designer asked him in the comments to upgrade to html5 so they could be viewed on an iPad:

I assume the last comment is a joke. Have always hated Flash but am suddenly envisioning an underground Net of people refusing to update to whatever spec Steve Jobs is currently co-opting. You could say and do pretty much anything and be invisible to the conformist “leading edge.” (Anyway, nice job with a couple of layers of obsolescentish tech, Joel.)

For those not following it, html 5 is the next generation browser spec. The big computer makers couldn't agree on the video standard part of it, so Apple took its toys and went home, forcing anyone who wants to make content for the fine family of Apple (TM) products to use a standard called H.264. (This is why Apple is known as "the new Microsoft.") This is supposed to "break Adobe," because Adobe's Flash multimedia spec will be obsolete when everyone switches over to html5 to enjoy their sleek Apple gear. Google is also aligned against Adobe and is switching YouTube from Flash to H.264.

The reason we're told we "need" a new standard is that Flash is too resource-hungry for small mobile devices such as smart phones, which we are assured are "the future of computing." Of course, the iPad isn't a phone, it's a neutered laptop, with a big screen and fast processors, which was made because people wanted to read books and watch movies and do other things that couldn't be done on computing's future. Point is it could handle Flash or any other less efficient standard but what's the fun of making a monopoly if you don't get to exclude people?

Update: The silly rhetoric about Apple leaving the past behind comes from Jobs himself. More on how Apple is leaving the past behind by turning eBooks into regular old uncopyable books.

Perfect day - Bennett celebrates the good times at double happiness with a selection of oversized photos people persist in posting to the internet.

Disquiet responds to Jaron Lanier's cranky-old-man view of artistic originality and its supposed disappearance in the welter of Web 2.0 herd technologies. Lanier pens a theory that could have been a wall label in the Third Reich's degenerate art exhibition: "The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a whole that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first order-expression."

In response to that comes Disquiet's calm, sane voice, as heard in this excerpt:

--Technology opens a window into habits of the past. Technology may perversely magnify some human traits (witness the crowd mentality of message boards, and the double-edged sword that is online anonymity), but it also, in many cases, simply makes them more apparent. Prince borrowed sped-up vocals from Parliament-Funkadelic and Béla Bartók based his compositions on folk melodies and Bob Dylan purloined lyrics and melodies from the blues and the Beach Boys loved Chuck Berry just a little too self-evidently — these are not isolated incidents, but mere drops in the example pool of how musicians who are seen as exemplars of originality in fact used pre-existing culture in pursuit of their own voice. Every bands starts out as a cover band.

--Go beyond the (newly Balkanized) pop charts, and there is a vast expanse of music built from randomness, from shards of sound, from an exploration of silence (digitally enabled silence), from interactive technologies, and, yes, from pre-existing source material (not just from recorded music, aka samples, but from data turned into sound). We are not at the end of musical history, nor is it in sight. Enchanted by new tools, we may be basking for the moment in that very newness, but only to make sense of them, to adopt them into our practice. We may as a culture simply be covering the past as we give those tools a test ride.

See also Daniel Albright on Poulenc and Surrealist Music: giants of second-order expression have been around for a while. Jungle drum and bass is an example of a new (now old) kind of pop music that was developed by faceless scenesters rather than first-order ubermenschen.

Correction to radio4forum's YouTube post titled "Acid House from 1958":

This 1959 track by Tom Dissevelt is not "Syncopation," it's titled "Vibration" (US title "The Visitor from Inner Space"). It's on a 2004 collection called "Popular Electronics: Early Dutch Electronic Music from Philips Research Laboratories, 1956-1963." Not much in common with 80s Acid house except that it is made with electronic sounds. Dissevelt was a jazzman; the loose, disjointed rhythm here might be called "swinging"--it's certainly more complex than Acid's usual 4-on-the-floor thump.

Not enough space in the comment box to say it's a great piece of music.

"Author's cut" of an article that appeared in the now-defunct magazine On Paper (aka Art on Paper), May-June 1997, page 8 (the column title was "New York Paper"). The paragraph on Richard Tuttle had his supporters up in arms, from what the editors told me. The words "legend has it" were added to the bit about Marcia Tucker being fired from the Whitney over the '70s Tuttle show, because I couldn't back up the anecdote--this was before Google. The paragraph on the Guggenheim Soho was also removed--you have to remember, this predated blogging, when discourse was extremely polite.

Works on paper on view in Manhattan this month offer a tour of the space-time continuum: from the Antarctic Ocean to distant galaxies, from Columbus's discovery of America to the Whitney's discovery of the moment.

Through May 30, The Hispanic Society of America, at 613 W. 155th Street, presents "Defining the Americas: Accounts and Images from Latin America from the European Encounter to Independence," showing how European travelers depicted the flora, fauna, and native peoples of the New World in published manuscripts dating from 1500 to 1850 A. D.

The earliest images are the most fascinating, with artists struggling to represent the unfamiliar based on known models. In one graphic 16th Century image, of cannibals roasting explorers over an open flame, the natives appear as identical bald Caucasians wearing earrings and loincloths. Elsewhere armadillos and coatimundis are seen as hybrids of European animals, some with human faces. Despite errors of perspective and proportion, another image from the late 1500s presents the grim truth of the "European encounter." Exquisitely faded, this fragile sketch depicts natives and llamas hauling ore down an Andean mountain, under the eyes of Spanish overseers. As the wall-text explains, these were the silver mines of Potosi, Peru, "which financed the military machine of the kings of Spain."

In another eye-opening exhibit, at The New York Historical Society, we learn that one of the great 19th Century naturalists slaughtered thousands of birds in his lifetime. "Taking Flight: John James Audubon and the Watercolors for The Birds of America" (through September 7, at 2 West 77th Street) reveals that Audubon was an avid hunter, and while his shooting provided him with his models, most often it was done for the sheer thrill of it. The exhibit features an impressive number of his original watercolors: done in the era before the shortcuts of camera-ready illustration, they are more intricate and emotionally invested than one might expect (Audubon makes Andrew Wyeth look like Leroy Neiman). The obsessively-rendered images, incorporating gouache, pastel, and oil glazes in addition to watercolor, convey more about the "essential bird"--be it flamingo, condor, or the now-extinct Carolina parakeet--than the dull objectivity of the camera ever could.

If Audubon has an antithesis, it might be 20th Century artist Richard Tuttle, whose works are so enigmatic and ephemeral they got Marcia Tucker fired from her Whitney curatorial post, legend has it, when she showed them back in the '70s. When Tuttle is "on," he amazes you with his ability to make something out of virtually nothing--a scrap of paper, a few pencil marks--but when he's not, as is often the case in his show of prints and bookworks on view at the New York Public Library--he can be awfully precious. The exhibit demonstrates Tuttle's commitment to the book as a medium, with scores of examples from all phases of his career. Most were produced in connection with museums and galleries, and far too many have a souvenir look (as opposed to something realized out of inner need). The best works were the earliest, done on a budget, such as Sparrow, 1965, an edition of 25 bound in raw canvas, opened to a gorgeous geometric drawing in mauve and green-gold. (The exhibition runs through May 31, at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.)

Also in contemporary vein, Karen McReady Fine Art presents "Oceans and Galaxies," an up-to-date survey of cosmic and oceanic themes in a variety of media (through April 26, at 425 W. 13th Street, 5th Floor) The show could be viewed as an enormous sandwich with Vija Celmins as the bread, each work relating in some way to Celmins' deadpan drawings of ocean waves, on the one hand, or starscapes, on the other. Celmins herself is amply represented, most notably by a wood engraving (No Title, 1995) which could be the sea after the Pequod went down, from a heretofore-unknown edition of Moby Dick. Other obvious inclusions are Hiroshi Sugimoto's ethereal, watery horizons and Thomas Ruff's astral views. Particularly striking is Stuart Klipper's chromogenic print of a vast triangular slab of Antarctic ice, sheared off with apocalyptic finality and surrounded by dark ocean--a landscape utterly indifferent to human experience.

Further downtown, at the Guggenheim Soho, one can see "Art/Fashion," a modified version of an exhibit at the Biennale de Firenze curated by Germano Celant, Interview editor Ingrid Sischy, and others (ending June 8). Recreating pavilions at the Biennale, the exhibit pairs famous artists and stars of the fashion world--e. g., Tony Cragg/Karl Lagerfeld, Roy Lichtenstein/Versace--and the curators have the incredible hubris to compare this mixing of brand names with the creative ferment of the early Modernist era, when Picasso made costumes for Diaghilev and the Russian constructivist Varvara Stepanova designed attire for female workers. Fortunately, to give us a taste of that earlier era, they have assembled examples of clothing by Futurists, Surrealists, and other artists, and the bold, colorful sketches of dresses and suits by Giacomo Balla and Sonya Delaunay, in particular, steal the show. (These works, as well as recent clothing-related sculptures by Beverly Semmes, Vito Acconci, and Wiebke Siem, deserve better than this trivializing context, which harks back to MOMA's "Primitivism/Modernism" show in the '80s.)

Finally, the Whitney Biennial, on view through June 1, features some excellent photography and work on paper, in keeping with this year's focus on narrative and "artists' cosmologies." Particularly noteworthy are John Schabel's photos of passengers sitting in airplanes, shot from bridges and overpasses without their knowledge (using a telephoto lens). These soft, grainy images are as chilling as surveillance photos, but with an unexpected poignancy--a sort of Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? Who Are We? for the age of air travel.

Although the New York Times singled out Shazia Sikander's small works for high praise, the artist's creative strategies--incorporating abstract and biomorphic elements into Indian miniatures relating to her life and past--seem pretty obvious, particularly in comparison to Kerry James Marshall's work, paintings of African-American families in suburban utopias (resembling theatrical backdrops altered with collage and drippy abstract marks), which are both inviting and curiously impenetrable. With Marshall's work, you keep looking, searching for the elusive meaning; with Sikander's the moment of disorientation quickly dissipates. Neverthless, it is nice to see work on an intimate scale in an exhibition that continues to be dominated by in-your-face installations.

--Tom Moody