see you at CAVE bar and restaurant

HELLO... I'M ON THE TRAIN... NO, THE TRAIN... YOU'RE BREAKING UP...

"It just feels right to hold the internet in your hands as you surf it.
And with a screen this large you can just see more of the web, as
you're surfing it... The whole website... in the cleft of your ass..."
- Steve Jobs

life under a heliocentric regime

Money is now pregnant

Upsidedown Sieg Heil

A Very Young Artist

"Recruited as plantation hands, they frequently showed themselves unwilling to work steadily. Induced to raise a cash crop, they would not react "appropriately" to market changes: as they were interested mainly in acquiring specific items of consumption, they produced that much less when crop prices rose, and that much more when prices fell off. And the introduction of new tools or plants that increased the productivity of indigenous labour might only then shorten the period of necessary work, the gains absorbed rather by an expansion of rest than of output. All these and similar responses express an enduring quality of traditional domestic production, that it is production of use values, definite in its aim, so discontinuous in its activity."

Marshall Sahlins - Stone Age Economics quoted in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Michael Taussig

"PETER" or "CRUSHING THE SPIDER"

Hidetsu Yagi, co-inventor of the Yagi Antenna.

transitive verb or adjective.

Diagnostic terms invented by two very different 20th C

artists to describe the methodology of rehearsing a

tired (pre-existing) artistic formula for the sake of

market success.

"Your Beautiful Internet"

Given that his character chain-smokes his way through most of Nine, it seems safe to assume that he was smoking off camera as well. "Oh, all the time," he says. "All the time."

Daniel Day-Lewis interviewed in The Guardian

entwürfen für müttergenesungswerke

designs for rest stations for mothers

by Martin Kippenberger

"The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made from a single pearl" –Book of Revelation 21:21

"Analogy, functioning as a circular mode of thought, makes it possible to tour the whole area of art and luxury without ever leaving it. Thus Château Margaux wine can be described with the same words as are used to describe the château, just as others will evoke Proust apropos of Monet or César Franck which is a good way of talking about neither (...)"
–Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 53.

heterotopias

"....the divans and settees in the final room were placed just so to give visitors a spot to rest and discretely breastfeed a newborn baby, or to sink into a space of lazy, navel-gazing thought - as someone might on the therapist's couch."
- T'ai Smith "West(ern) Waste(land): On Franz West at the Baltimore Art Museum" published in Texte Zur Kunst, June 2009

Nothingness in the air

http://www.ccca.ca/history/isaacs/english/68photos1.html

Chess Game Performance
Marcel Duchamp / John Cage

Ryerson Theatre, March 5, 1968

Avrom Isaacs recounts that, after the chess game "performance" between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Duchamp visited his home, and in true Duchampian fashion, "nothing happened."

(See, also, Dennis Reid, "Duchamp in Canada", Canadian Art [Winter 1987]: 52-54).

Yuppie Flu: "a psychological stress condition that paralyzes the performance of talented people and produces long-lasting flu-like symptoms."
–David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990

The art dealer says: "I like that Jeremy and Neil come from a kind of urban-downtown-punk-skate-band based kind of culture"

"Note that billion in traditional British usage means a million million, not, as in American usage, a thousand million. Editors working with material by British writers may need to query the use of this term."
–Chicago Manual of Style

Pavlov's Platypus

One of my colleagues told me about the lake outside the GlaxoSmithKline building in Ware, Hertfordshire. The lake is stocked with Koi Carp and spanned by a wooden bridge. For nine months before the building opened, a man was paid to walk over the bridge every day, feeding the fish as he went. Now, when clients of the company arrive, they are obliged to cross the bridge to reach the building entrance. Schools of fish suddenly appear beneath them and follow their every step across the lake.

JUNK

Bobo International

"A well-cultivated person will not stoop to compete for the No. 1 place with average Joes and Janes. A bobo is well-cultivated. His notebook displays a style of simplicity. Bobos love country folk, a weathered fisherman, a craftsman in the remote coutnryside, or a short and plump artist who dances simple folk dances and sings simple folk songs. For bobos, those simple-minded country folk look serene and peaceful. Although they are poor, they lead a rich life... Corresponding to the fundamental spirit of the bobos is the simple but smart-looking E100. It is clothed in simple dark blue, but its keyboard and LCD screen shines in fashionable silver. A contradictory colour scheme like this matched with a daring design delivers to the bobos a jazzy sense of romance."
–advert copy for Legend Solei Notebook E100

Rottercouver or Vandam???

the Other likes to drink red wine too!

"With the extenuation of the political sphere, the president comes increasingly to resemble that Puppet of Power who is the head of primitive societies. (Clastres)
"All previous presidents pay for and continue to pay for Kennedy's murder as if they were the ones who had suppressed it–which is true phantasmatically, if not in fact. They must efface this defect and this complicity with their simulated murder. Because, now it can only be simulated. Presidents Johnson and Ford were both the object of failed assassination attempts which, if they were not staged, were at least perpetrated by simulation. The Kennedys died because they incarnated something: the political, political substance, whereas new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film–curiously, Johnson, Nixon, Ford all have this simian mug, the monkeys of power."
–Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981

Encouragement for Dioxin sniffers

"The conceptualists liked to propound the following question: suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old automat at Union square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for - and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording the greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: of course, it was. "

- Tom Wolfe, "Up the fundamental aperture", in The Painted Word, 1975.

DID YOU HEAR RADIOHEAD WILL COLLABORATE ON A NEW CITY WITH RICHARD FLORIDA?

"Noise can make sleeping difficult on occasions, whether from snoring, sexual activity, someone either returning late or leaving early or the close proximity of so many people. This can be solved by carrying earplugs." – From Wikipedia "Hostel" entry.

The ten pound garbanzo bean

Inevitably, when addressing Knowles' diversified oeuvre, one is drawn to the authorial presence of the artist as it is self-consciously inserted into the work. This entry point is encouraged by Knowles' practice of deploying his signature in the spectacular form of a logotype, a practice in which the artist's monogram is stylized into a symbol like those that are commonly used by corporations for brand-marketing purposes. During a decades-long refusal to attain a consistent and identifiable morphology, "KEK" at once stands as a nexus bringing together a diverse array of projects and providing a stable chart for translations into meaning.
–Alexander Alberro, Meaning at the Margins: The Semiological Inversions of Knowles Eddy Knowles

Pantomime Individualism

Canary Wharf Seasonal Reassurance Patrols

As a regular seasonal response, the Metropolitan Police Service is increasing the number of high visibility reassurance patrols around the Canary Wharf estate, including armed police officers, mounted police and specialist dog units. The increase in patrols is not in relation to any specific information or incident and colleagues are advised that there will be random checks of pedestrians and vehicles. If you are stopped by a patrolling officer, please be patient and cooperative.

"Youth gets power because it doesn't know what to do with it."

"However as Beckwith and McDonald remember, by then it had become more difficult to sustain a collaborative approach, and as time went on there were fewer meetings with fewer attendees. The group's research and production methods began to resemble those of the exquisite corpse, with images assembled bit by bit, each collaborator adding to the composition in sequence. This tendency ran contrary to the privileging of process and collaboration that [Colin] de Land had insisted on, and threatened to move them towards the mire of the blinkered, career-obsessed art world."

– Jackie McCallister, A.C.2K, A.F.A., Co., C.d.L. Afterall 22.
[Note: article regarding the group Art Club 2000, which was active from 1992-1999.]

This season, say it with neon

"What a day was this!... On that day, 30,000 of the finest animals in the world were concentrated within an area of four or five acres. They had been pouring in from ten o'clock on the Sunday evening, insomuch that by daylight on the Monday they presented one dense animated mass, an agitated sea of brute life. All around the market the animals encroached on space rightfully belonging to shop-keeping traffic... for the cauldron of steaming animalism overflowed from very fullness."

George Dodd, The Food of London quoted in Hungry City by Carolyn Steel

The Magic of Woodworking

"In last year's issue of this annual paper, we ran with the headline - The End or a New Beginning? One year on, it's clearly a new beginning.
The art market ended its spring/summer season on a more optimistic note than many had predicted. Sales in Hong Kong, New York and London were clearly showing signs of a market levelling out. In June, London's contemporary evening sales raised £42.3 million against a low estimate of £42.6 million. although the total was 76% lower than June 2008, it was still an encouraging 63% higher than what was achieved in February 2009.
Global stockmarkets have experienced a rapid price appreciation since reaching a low in March this year. However, the market runs the risk of running out of steam as the recovery in the US seems to be dragging on longer than expected, increasing the danger of a double-dip recession – which could have consequences for the art market recovery process.
So where is the contemporary art market going from here? Sideways, is the most likely scenario. The results from the recent contemporary art auctions in New York were encouraging, and came in-line with the market expectations. Sotheby's sold 75.1% by lot and 85% by value, raising $5.5 million, which was roughly half the amount raised in September 2008 ($10.5 million). Christie's achieved a similar result, with 83% sold by lot and 88% sold by value. (...)
ArtTactic's most recent US and European Art Market Confidence survey in June 2009, also confirmed that confidence is coming back, after a 81% drop in December 2008. The survey indicated that the downturn in the contemporary art market could end sooner than initially anticipated, with 64% of the respondents believing the contemporary art market could rebound within the next 1-2 years."
– ArtTactic; An Insider's View to the Art Market, Autumn 2009 (a free newspaper handed out on the streets in front of Regent's Park, London, site of Frieze Art Fair)

"Familiar with contemporary literature, film, philosophy and science, the young artists are extremely articulate – many earn M.A.'s as a credential for teaching. And like many of their peers, they are also into marijuana and LSD. ... The life style and perceptual distortions of drugs are simply taken for granted the way abstract expressionists took drinking for granted."
–Howard Junker, Newseek, summer 1968

stumbling over your own corpse

"Despite his admiration for Fried, Wall is generous when it comes to Minimalism [to the extent] that a work by Carl Andre [that] is similar in scale to Las Meniñas inspires him to a rather bizarre fantasy in which he is standing on an Andre while looking at Las Meniñas."
– Sven Lütticken, Secret Publicity

A circle of saints

I FOLLOW NOONE I AM A LONE SOLDIER

PARTICIPATIONJUNKIE@

ORDERANDDISORDER@GMAIL.COM

ALLPOSSIBLEOUTCOMES

NEVERDISAPPOINTED

WHEREDIDYOUGETYOURCURLYHAIR@

ARBITRARY

ABSENT_FATHER@INTRUCTIONPIECE.CH

From the Library of Adam Curtis

"thinks that it is crucial to work less, to insist on better payment (even if this means no payment at all), to stop producing oneself (as on Facebook), to try to establish solidarity with like minded people (not on the net) and this against the forced individualisation and isolation by capitalism, to think things through carefully before publishing them, instead of throwing all ones knowledge away for nothing etc etc"
– Isabelle Graw via Facebook

"WHY do marketing psychologists call refrigerators 'frozen islands of security'?"

NASA researcher checking hydroponic onions with Bibb lettuce to his left and radishes to the right

"Reports of Gericke's work and his claims that hydroponics would revolutionize plant agriculture prompted a huge number of requests for further information. Gericke refused to reveal his secrets claiming he had done the work at home on his own time. This refusal eventually resulted in his leaving the University of California."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics

"From this encounter at the Café Select, the idea of an exhibition of do-it-yourself descriptions and procedural instructions took shape, an exhibition that would mix contributors from different generations, different cultural backgrounds, and different disciplines, and one whose parameters would leave all contributors perfectly equal in the use of instructions. On paper napkins, we started to write down names of artists who we thought would be likely to deliver some fascinating instructions, even though they really hadn't used this modus operandi before. The list appeared infinite, with the result that do it was en marche as an exhibition that would always exist as a score until a venue could be found in which it could be interpreted and performed anew each time."
– Hans Ulrich Obrist

Refutation in action

Real estate agents working outside in a park to plot out maps of their properties.

"The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume – your capital. The less you are... the more you have."
– Karl Marx