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Everyone in the world linked to this Mario Bros. fan art page, and well they should, it's a mother lode of punchy, brow-furrowing drawings. The content ranges from almost-professional renderings of Mario and Luigi as musclebound superheroes to endearingly inept Jim Shaw thrift store show-like portraits. In my fantasies, someone prints out all the images really large on Sintra board or Duratrans, and holds a kind of Iron Chef competition between the artists on those pages and some overindulged bad boy of the art world like, say, Sean Landers. Especially fun would be the judging, which would consist of those same five people who regularly appear on Iron Chef--the elderly critic, the pretty actress, etc.--sitting and making pronouncements to a humbled Landers like: "This is very bold, but I felt your irony wasn't quite strong enough--you are not truly weird in your art."
From the New York Times, news that Agnes Gund, a president emerita of MOMA, has resigned from the foundation dedicated to redeveloping the WTC site:
In a letter to John C. Whitehead, the foundation's chairman, Ms. Gund lamented the erosion of the original master plan for the site, which was drafted to "permanently memorialize what happened on Sept. 11, while also bringing and weaving the site back into the fabric of the city."Roowwwwrrrr! (sorry, it has to be uttered). The crappy state of downtown cultural redevelopment can be laid at the feet of one person: a right wing blowhard named Debra Burlingame. Turns out there are good 9/11 widows (the Jersey moms who shamed the government into finally holding hearings) and one very bad, very loud one, who is pushing her bum taste in art and predilection for censorship on the whole city, using the emotional fulcrum of her husband's death in the Pentagon strike four years ago. (In case you haven't been following this, she opposed the relocation of the Drawing Center to the site, as well as any other organization that presents art she deems "critical of the US.") Hadn't heard that about Clinton signing on for the suppression of free speech at the site, but it shouldn't surprise anyone given her ongoing support for the senseless slaughter of American troops in Iraq.
Now, she wrote in her letter dated Thursday, "Governor Pataki (and it saddens me to say, Senator Clinton has joined him) has caved and virtually ensured that there will be no cultural component to the redevelopment."
"I hate to walk away from this situation and leave it to you and the others to sort out," continued Ms. Gund, who is a president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art. "But I am afraid that the governor and those few family members have succeeded in destroying what could not be destroyed on that awful Tuesday, which is our hope."
Gretchen Dykstra, president of the memorial foundation - the organization charged with raising money for a memorial and for cultural institutions at ground zero - said yesterday that she was disappointed by Ms. Gund's departure but not discouraged.
"Of course, we will miss Aggie, not just for her wealth but for her wisdom," she said. "But we in no way find this a setback."