View current page
...more recent posts
Jerry Saltz has a piece on artnet about the Artforum online diary. I looked at that journal, mostly chronicling who went to what opening after-party, a couple of times, got a creeped-out feeling and didn't go back. I understand the art world is suffering the influx of "Bush millionaires" who are chasing increasingly younger artists, but I'm removed from that process, in the sense that I'm not really a working critic these days who has to follow the nuances professionally, the way Saltz does. I'm confident the whole schmear will implode soon enough. I can relate to Saltz's story about giving a crit to the kid who'd just been picked up by a gallery, though, mainly as a viewer: I can tick off many reasons why I don't think, say, Julie Mehretu's work is "there" yet* but she's already been canonized by the gallery process--to the extent of having million-dollar lawsuits over the value of her art! This is real tulip mania stuff and I just can't get too concerned about it.
Jesse mentioned the Saltz article in connection with my rant about the "slow dimension" and the art world's stubborn refusal to get the internet. An alternative model for art production and critique will likely continue to grow in cyberspace while the art world bogs down in stuff that doesn't matter. The problem with the AF diary is it doesn't address ideas--it uses a kind of fake blog format to chronicle the personalities and flow of money, which is mildly interesting, but sort of a waste of a good medium. It's going to take a generation dying off before real substantive change occurs in the way art is made and consumed.
*Pointlessly busy, doesn't know what to leave out yet, murky content (is it really ethnic/political or is that all in the press release?), derivative of Matthew Ritchie, etc. etc...
The castlezzt.net guy has a blog now. He's posting under the name "Jack Masters." Interesting pictures, funny/surreal descriptions of dreams, wry philosophical musings, including thoughts on Excel charts that make me suspect a connection to the IT industry (who else would care about Excel?). He's been updating castlezzt, too, and I guess it was inevitable given the cost of bandwidth that "the mile long web page" has been broken into multiple pages.
Update: Jim says the computer monitor arch appeared on Gizmodo and has been making the rounds. They didn't credit it either. The image below is also good, no idea where he (Masters) got it:
AMC (The American Movie Classics channel on cable) ran an ad for a documentary they produced about the post-release editing of Hollywood content to remove "offensive" language and scenes. Didn't see the documentary, so I don't know whether the culprits were local TV stations, fundamentalist Christian-owned tech businesses or some combination. Either way, the outrage from people in the interview clips they showed led me to believe AMC thinks the practice is bad. Well, this is a howler coming from that channel, which up until 2001 or so showed movies intact, but now edits them for language and Orson knows what else.
A couple of examples of AMC's own practices:
Trivial (but still egregious): In David E. Kelley's weird horror comedy Lake Placid, about a 30-foot crocodile living in a Maine lake (an obvious homage to the young John Sayles), Betty White plays a crazy woman who has been feeding her cows to the croc for five years, treating it as a combination pet and pagan God to be appeased. The sublime Brendan Gleeson as a local cop confronts her at one point and the erstwhile Golden Girl ripostes, "If I had a dick this is where I'd tell you to suck it." OK, it's not all that funny but it's really not funny when "dick" becomes "____" and you still see her mouth moving.
Ahistorical and evil: One of the revelations of the Watergate years was that Nixon had a guy on his reelection campaign payroll named Donald Segretti, whose specialty was "ratfucking"--little dirty tricks like distributing flyers for opposing campaign events that never happen, releasing smears and rumors about the other guy etc. Part of America's fall from innocence in the '70s was learning that people at the very top thought and talked that way. Karl Rove, Bush's so-called brain, got his start in that campaign, so knowing about the practice and how sleazy these people are is still completely relevant. Anyway, to wrap this up, when AMC ran All the President's Men this bit of actual history was airbrushed to "rat____ing."