Sharp as Teeth and Stars

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Wed May 22

“ The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. Paul Johnson, The Recovery of Freedom, 1980

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lalouver:

If you’re in or around the Chicago area, be sure to catch this mural produced by Gajin Fujita along with nine members of Los Angeles’ K2S graffiti crew.

Titled CHI-TOWN, the 10 x 130 foot (3 x 39.6 m) mural was commissioned by curator Dave Hickey in fall 2012 for Chicago’s citywide public art exhibition Big Art. The mural will remain on view throughout spring 2013.

To see a concise video that follows the mural’s production, visit our vimeo page.

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The Neighbors
Arne Svenson

“New Yorkers are masters of being both the observer and the observed. We live so densely packed together that contact is inevitable—even our homes are stacked facing each other. I have found this symbiotic relationship between the looker and the observed only here—we understand that privacy is fluid and that glass truly is transparent.

(Source: arnesvenson.com)

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Fox I by Brage Moreite Nørholm

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archimaps:

Design proposal for the Washington Monument, Washington D.C.

(via empathies)

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Tue May 21

drawpaintprint:

Lecture by writer and art critic Dave Hickey. Recorded at the University of Memphis, 1997.

good lecture

I love the following definitions he gives for ‘the beautiful’ and ‘beauty:

‘The beautiful’ is created by communities as a mode of social control. The beautiful is a set of attributes of configurations that a particular culture creates and inculcates to control the behavior of the members of that culture.”

as opposed to:

‘Beauty’ is something you have never seen before that you have always wanted to see. It’s something that changes the structure of society. Beauty is created by individual people who don’t like the way it looks and want to propose an alternative system of value. Beauty rather than being created by communities creates communities, and I call these communities of desire. Groups of people brought together not because of who they are, but of what they’re not, what they want, and what they would rather see. This what works of art do, and is how nearly all art works in this culture.

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“ Her monotonous family life and the absence of adequate intellectual occupation left her with an unemployed surplus of mental liveliness and energy, and this found an outlet in the constant activity of her imagination. This led to a habit of day-dreaming (her ‘private theatre’), which laid the foundations for a dissociation of her mental personality.

Josef Breuer, “Fräulein Anna O”, Studies on Hysteria, 1895

Anna O. and I have much in common.

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(Source: consumeconsume, via blaaargh)

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cruiseorbecruised:

artqueer:

David Wojnarowicz in front of his artwork Fuck You Faggot Fucker

(Source: currentinspiration)

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Today I’ve been sorting through my notebooks and papers from the last year. I often feel as though I never produce anything of academic, social, or cultural value, but this sorting has made me realize I do produce quite a bit of independent writing. It’s all very inconsistent and haphazardly organized though… much like my mind, and not worth publishing in total. I should work on editing and compiling some of the more insightful work, because not all of it is worth being tossed into my trunk of past writings to be forgotten until I die and the trunk is found or I am investigated for possible future crimes.

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“ Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward. Kurt Vonnegut (via lesilencieux)

(Source: awakeinthedream, via lesilencieux)

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“

On its own, it is a wonder, but viewed in isolation its complexity and very existence is inexplicable. Darwin’s genius was to see that the existence of something as magnificent as a blade of grass can be understood, but only in the context of its interaction with other living things and, crucially, its evolutionary history. A physicist might say it is a four-dimensional structure, with both spatial and temporal extent, and it is simply impossible to comprehend the existence of such a structure in a universe governed by the simple laws of physics if its history is ignored.

And whilst you are contemplating the humble majesty of a blade of grass, with a spatial extent of a few centimeters but stretching back in the temporal direction for almost a third of the age of the Universe, pause for a moment to consider the viewer, because what is true of the blade of grass is also true fro you. You share the same basic biochemistry, all the way down to the detail of proton waterfalls, and ATP, and much of the same genetic history, carefully documented in your DNA. This is because you share the same common ancestor. You are all related. You were once the same.

Brian Cox channels Richard Feynman in this reminder that viewing science through any single lens is an incomplete view of its magnificence. In other words, physics is beautiful, but it’s a periscope view of life’s majesty.

From his new book to accompany the BBC series, Wonders of Life.

via Brain Pickings

(via jtotheizzoe)