general

Alan Sondheim, "Skinned" [YouTube]

Writhing, topologically-distorted flayed man--this is what we will all look like when the big black hole takes us in the Final Days. (Unless you are saved, then it will be OK.)

Stylistically, JODI's Max Payne cheats meets Carpenter's thing meets that exhibit with all the plasticized corpses. Quite gnarly and great. Sondheim's description of the method: "experimental motion capture doubled avatar work through poser and proprietary motion capture software."

Compare: Get Low, Petra Cortright hand (and Crispin Creeper finale), Silicious John McCain video.

An article in Minneapolis' The Rake titled The New Dada discusses Internet surfing clubs. The writer comes to the scene with a fresh set of eyes (i.e., from outside the circle of usual suspects looking in) and concludes that while much political art post 9/11 is "dull and dry and deadpan and rote," the clubs' brash and chaotic approach might be closer to the spirit of Zurich 1916.

Interestingly he found the clubs via online discussion of the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum. This blog feels a bit vindicated since it was trashed after the panel for being insufficiently respectful of the "sincere" political art that is out there.

A piece of mine was used in the article: the Mark Napier Steven Dutch Remix. It's funny, I've been introduced to Mark Napier several times and he says "I've heard your name somewhere..."

Post no. 666 (cue eerie music) at Spirit Surfers is a rotating, shimmering 1-bit cube. Quite lovely possible companion for this piece by Jim Hamlyn from the Infinite Fill Show.

Catherine Spaeth and CAP are discussing critic Harold Rosenberg and a post here got mentioned. Comment in reply:

Thanks for the link.

That blog post was actually not a good example of Rosenberg being mentioned only because Greenberg was.

The pairing of the two critics was the Jewish Museum's frame and the post was responding to it.

From your discussion (and the Jewish Museum's) it seems that Rosenberg was more interested in evaluating artists (are they heroic? cosmopolitan? a good embodiment of Marxist ideals?) than the artwork they make.

There is a strain of art that values personality and anecdote over work and it may trace itself back to "American Action Painters." But it's a bit like basing jurisprudence on the lives of the founding fathers and mothers rather than the study of history, economics, and so forth. Fun to read but incoherent if your goal is a common language.

You can compare work to work but it's hard compare artists to artists so you get careers based on personal funkiness, e.g.: "The most important thing about Tracey Emin is...well, her Tracey Emin-ness."

see also, Tracey Emin, Fame Academician (hat tip Marisa Olson). A feminist reading of Emin can be made and that writer doesn't even try, and there are certainly worse artists currently stroking personality cults (for example, Richard Serra).

The Guggenheim has an exhibit up now devoted to conservationist efforts to keep Ad Reinhardt paintings smooth and black for all eternity. It is more than a little nuts. A wall placard explains that in life Reinhardt was a teacher and therefore above the crude economics of buying and selling paintings. His abstractions aspired to spiritual and physical purity and the placard actually uses the pre-postmodern word "timeless." The rest of the exhibit shows how state of the art science is used to analyze the paint and varnish layers so they can be repaired to a state of perpetual newness (e.g., using laser-induced spectroscopy "to burn off submicron layers").

All this technology and research costs oodles of money and not surprisingly, that's what the paintings are now worth. There is something more than a bit decadent about the process of creating art that is almost impossible to keep free of scuffs and scratches and then doing whatever is necessary to keep it on life support. The exhibit, full of diagrams, photo blowups, and actual cut up "test paintings" fascinates in the degree to which it reveals an industry of extreme neurosis.