Monday, June 20, 2011

Link Panic

by Robert Boyd

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How many actual proletarians will be buying "proletariat" level tickets for Diverse Works's gala? In addition to a blind auction, Diverse Works is offering art via "Luck of the Draw" at their annual gala this Wednesday, June 22. Here's how it works: 112 artists donated pieces. If you paid $1000, you get first choice from all these pieces. If you paid $500, you get choices two through five. If you are one of the 15 people who bought $250 tickets, you get to choose the next 15 pieces. At this point, there will be 91 pieces left (assuming each artist donated just one piece). Then if you bought a ticket at the "Proletariat" level (I'm not kidding--that's what it's called) for $125, you get to choose from whatever scraps your richer brethren left for you. (Diverse Works)

What Lubbock needs is a larger-than-life-sized statue of the great god Pan. TxDOT put this charming statue on a freeway in 2004:
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There was a concerted, organized effort by Christian extremists to get it removed. Why? Because it was "pagan." Then on August 13, 2004, vandals defaced it with a sledgehammer. It looked like this:
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No one knows why it was defaced--the vandals didn't take credit. The assumption--and it's just an assumption--is that someone took all this "pagan" nonsense seriously. Shades of Bamiyan Buddha statues, also destroyed by religious fanatics. The good news is that TxDOT is going to put up a new Windy Man reliefs. Their plan to prevent fanatics from repeating 2004? They are going to put it up really high. (KCBD, hat tip to Glasstire)

Can there be an art bubble? After Nouriel Roubini (aka "Dr. Doom") tweeted "I am in Basel for Art Basel. Thee is a bubble in contemporary art", Marion Maneker responded:
The economist’s definition of a bubble is when assets trade at values determined by their exchange, not their use. When the price of a stock, bond, house, commodity contract or any other financial asset becomes too divorced from price of its fundamentals—profits, interest or use value—the asset is said to be in a bubble.[...] With art, there is no financial or use value. There is no rational value. Every work of art has the potential to become valueless.
I can see the logic here, but if it's true, what do we call the most infamous bubble of all, tulipmania--the bubble that sent the prices of tulip bulbs in Holland to insane levels in 1637? I think I'm with Roubini on this one. (Art Market Monitor)

Charles Jencks, Post-Modern Theorist and Megalomaniac. Charles Jencks is known to me primarily as one of the earliest theorists of post-modernism. I was quite taken by his writing about architecture back in the 90s. Since then, he has apparently been heavily involved in landscape architecture. His latest project is a half-mile long landscape-sculpture of a woman's body, entitled Northumberlandia. (artdaily)

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Charles Jencks, Northumberlandia drawing



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