Valentine game: Hmm, it seems someone’s missing a marketing opportunity. There’s no “Valentine’s Day” computer game? So it seems. My scenario: naughty Cupid makes the oddest people fall in love at first sight, and the player then has to manage all the complications that ensue. Things get more manic when different couples start to interact. […]
Archive for January, 2005
Art info
Art info now as valuable as art?: Prospect magazine, on the nefarious plans of Louise MacBain…. “she is collecting all the sources of information about the art world available to her very considerable means” …. “MacBain now owns a near-complete encyclopaedia of prices and listings worldwide and, presumably to the horror of the secretive art […]
Szarkowski and Edgerton shows
Two articles: ….on new U.S. photography retrospectives. On Szarkowski, limbering up for his major retrospective at the San Francisco MoMA & elsewhere. And on Harold Edgerton’s MIT retropective.
Experimental landscapes
Experimental landscapes:Mmm, yes…. could look very nice, hanging above your new big pomegranate-red sofa…. (large version, 130kb) (large version, 140kb)
Canvas con
Canvas con: Fuelled by the “get a big canvas above your big sofa” fashion; ersatz assembly-line art, made in a sweatshop, yours for only $49.95. Alternatively, you can knock one up in your garage; The Teeside Evening Gazzette offers a handy DIY recipe.
The functions of Public Art
The functions of Public Art: A fascinating July 2004 full-text article, Art, Gentrification and Regeneration: from artist as pioneer to Public Art (PDF, 120kb). And a pithy quote from another article (not available online) which reviewed the critical literature on Public Art…. “In reviewing critical writing on public art it is apparent that the voices […]
SF degree
SF: Cool; people can now take an M.A. in Science Fiction Studies. In Liverpool, no less, where they have one of the world’s biggest collections.
Dudley by Turner
Dudley by Turner: Turner in the Black Country. Tipton, looking towards Dudley, to be precise.
Outside Out
Outside Out: New York has an Outsider Art Fair, and the critics are raving about it.
re:imagine
re:imagine: The Observer profile of Fotomoto. “Pop that develops in isolation can grow up rich and strange. Influences are mistranslated, mangled and reimagined.” And that’s what the net is changing, I suppose. We are moving towards a point in which a creative’s cultural influences will never again be ‘difficult’ to locate & obtain, if only […]
Systems of Romance
Systems of Romance: It’s a lottery, buying stuff from eBay. Not in terms of being swindled; that’s never happened to me. No, it’s the truffle-hunt for nostalgic items from lad-hood that can disappoint. That ‘totally hilarious’ Norman Wisdom film, Trouble in Store? A wooden turkey, today. The pop neo-romanticism of Ultravox’s 1978 album Systems of […]
P&P show
P&P redux: Couldn’t get to the Powell & Pressburger A Canterbury Tale exhibition in Canterbury, that closed just before Christmas? www.powell-pressburger.org has an illustrated review with hi-res gallery photos.
VW ad
Polo, mint: Superb bit of ‘disownable’ online viral marketing by VW. (2.6Mb .mov)
Alexander
Alexander: A welcome return to robust cultural criticism in today’s Telegraph. Andrew Marr on Alexander; “a great wheezing turkey of a cinematographic catastrophe, a flop so immense the very Earth shakes.”
Derby Day
Derby Day: The second of three major conferences on post-war British photography will be on 12th March 2005 in Derby, and will discuss photography in the 1980s. Q-arts is wrapping a mini-festival around this; Format 05. The latest issue of Source features a short report from the first conference; and an interesting fact is mentioned. […]
Hard rock
Hard rock: Just launched; a free online gallery of 6000 images of ancient British rock art.
German neo-romanticism
Out of the wilderness:Robert Hughes on German Romantic painting.
Working class self-education
DIY: A long article in The City Journal on the cultural self-education movement among the British working classes.
Chatt Valley documentary photo
Horsing about: Documentary photograph of Chatterley Valley; just to be able to remember it as it is now, before giant warehouses get built on it…. (large version, 85kb)
Hamilton Finlay’s garden
Wild garden: The Times, on a new photo book of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden.