The naked teacher: teaching performance art

CNN reports:Mo Xiaoxin, a 56-year-old assistant professor at a university in Changzhou, in eastern Jiangsu province, shocked students by stripping during a lecture on "body art" to emphasize the "power" of the body and to "challenge taboos," the Beijing News said."There are no taboos in the field of...

Thinking digital differently

Flowing in the baroque wilderness of fleshy forms, diving into the realm of whatifs and whynots, is a delicious project called pixelnouveau. Explore it, get lost in it as I did, discover the scent of digital daydreaming...As any truly experimental project, it has its more...

Size matters?

I'm sorry. The post from two days ago was bad. I'm putting it offline and leaving only a minimalist version.Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, Cupid's SpanSize matters? How exactly?----Kant's distinction between aesthetic experience and sublime experience could mean...

Banksy exhibition...gallery-style

See this great text by Valerie Palmer about a recent Banksy exhibition. The elephant was apparently a fitting centerpiece and stole the show from the political ideas we're used to seeing from the British sweet-painting rebel. Bottom line:The power of his work lies in the...

Style. Beyond the individual

Exactitudes (= exact attitudes), by photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek, is an exercise in style (or rather was, from 1994 to 2002 - it is now present online, in a traveling exhibition and in the form of a book). Style is what makes the person unique,...

Al Magnus: taking children seriously

For Al Magnus, it all started with having children.How surprizing is that? Of course, these are images of fairly tales. Some actually ring a bell. Most are rather fairy tales in themselves. But to start off, remember they were not meant for us, but for the little ones....

For V.

The work, by Maarten Vanden Eynde, is called Rave Nature, but here is something interesting: the photo's file on the artist's server is named podium. I much prefer this second name. Also, as we can read here, contrary to many other works of land art, the work as such was...

Remixing stuffed birds

Pour les dents d'un blanc éclatant e saines (meaning: for teeth that are shining white and healthy) is an installation by Jeroen Diepenmaat. In it, stuffed birds play records by putting their bill into the groove. One of the impressive things about it is that it's not one...

In these dark days

Oh, entertain me, do entertain me, make silly things, funny things, call them art, call them rat, but make them pleasant and direct and, why not, simple, and use the tongue of greatest lovers, the tongue that tickles, that brings emotions to the flower of the skin, as the...

September 11

***I found the second of these two works by Peter Coffin as an illustration to this article by art critic Jerry Saltz. Two other discoveries Saltz provides are the Strange Powers exhibition at the Creative Time gallery (unfortunately judging from the participating artists,...

I have been working on transferring all the articles to the new labeling system. So far, 50 out of some 500 posts have been re-tagged, so be patient. In the meantime, you can search through the archives or Google's searchbox.

Próżna 2006 (translation of review by Dorota Jarecka)

I rarely do it, but it's worth it. The following is my translation of an article by Dorota Jarecka that appeared yesterday in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.The Project Próżna 2006 breaks with the sentimental-folk climate of the "Singer's Warsaw" festival. Nobody here tries to prove that one can...

Art that speaks for itself

One of the most important issues I have been struggling with recently is the question of commentary within the artwork. Take a conceptual work and leave out the comments. What do you get? What is a life of a concept without a conceptual framework? Behind the rhetorical question lies a complicated issue....

Darker

I have just played the internet version of Russian Rulette, by Carlos Katastrofsky. This is what I got:

Easy still

Yes, we are still in the slow, gentle recovery zone. That's why all these really sweet links. Here is another one:The story is too easy, etc etc. But let's just let it go for now.Enjoy the fall of an angel. By Geoffroy Barbet Massin, produced by the digital editing studio...

Oh, why not

All paintings are by Esao Andrews. He also designs skateboards, in case you're interested. Here is an interview with the talented young man. Oh, and if you see his photos (on his page), mind you those are ballerinas' feet.