“As part of its Project 1012, an effort to ‘clean up’ the city’s famous Red Light District, Amsterdam’s city government has already teamed up with private enterprise to replace a number of bordellos with studio space for fashion designers. Now, along with the organization Kunstenaars and Co. […] the city has collaborated with real estate company De Key […] in a new project designed to accommodate sculptors, painters, and other visual artists.” (source)
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Legendary literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki went to the big gala where they handed out the major German TV awards and told people he was going to reject the “honorary” one awarded to him, because what they showed on TV was mostly “disgusting”. The moderator managed to somehow save face for everybody by suggesting to have a multi-channel TV show with Reich-Ranicki to talk about the issues (story; video - both unfortunately in German only; you can probably easily tell who is who in the image above). Pric/zeless!
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After having talked about it with a blogger friend, I wager that Cute Overload is everybody’s favourite (extremely secret) guilty pleasure. So if you’re tired of that one and even of that one…
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There appears to be fairly wide-spread consensus in the blogging community that there’s a dearth of critical discussions of photography online. You wouldn’t really know this from reading blogs, because nobody posts about it. However, the many email exchanges and conversations I’ve had with people tell me that there are lots of people who would actually like to see photography being discussed in a more critical manner. (updated below)
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“The bloody legacy of the Baader Meinhof Gang which caused mayhem across West Germany with its politically-motivated assassinations, bombings and kidnappings is to be portrayed on cinema screens this week in a new film which claims to debunk the myth of 1970s terrorist chic. Just how raw the darkest chapter in Germany’s postwar history remains has been demonstrated by the angry reaction that the Baader Meinhof Komplex has prompted from victims’ families, the children of gang members and historians.” (story)
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“A new sculpture in a southern German town square has tourists snapping pictures and politicians arguing about the role of public art. The work shows Angela Merkel naked, along with other politicians, and the artist is unapologetic. He calls the work his ‘group-sex relief.’” - story
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“The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. […] In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. […] I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. […] In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. […] And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.’” - President John F. Kennedy, in remarks given at Amherst College, October 26, 1963
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“What is censorship? Censorship is a form of prohibition and punishment. Ever since the 15th century products of the printing press have been subject to censorship and since the 20th century the same has applied to film, radio, television and the Internet. Censorship thus relates to public communication and content in word, image and sound.” - An excellent overview from the Persmuseum in Amsterdam. Many of the examples are from Holland, but that doesn’t take away from a look at censorship from 1600 until today.
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“…the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.” - Jonathan Haidt (italics as in original text)
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When you download the pdf from this page the document might look weird at first for those not used to looking at scientific papers. But keep flipping the pages to see some of the art work… I’m aware of the fact that this might be really just a fringe issue for this blog, but I’m sure there are enough people out there who’ll enjoy seeing this stuff.
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What John McCain is now learning the hard way right is that properly vetting the pick for vice president is a very good idea (just as an aside, his pick of an ultra-conservative governor with basically no experience and a whole bunch of scandals despite her young age is extremely amusing). Proper vetting is also a good idea for people who just want to forward an image that supposedly shows Sarah Palin, posing with a gun and an American flag bikini: A two-second Google investigation reveals it’s not real.
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This is just an aside (even though it’s all caused by me looking into some of the recommendations about on-demand printing I’ve received via email): If you have a business one of the worst things you can do is to make it hard to see your price list. Some on-demand publishing site just told me I had to “register” to be able to see the price list. Needless to day, they’ll never see me as a customer. Behaviour like this appears to be quite symptomatic for many of those on-demand publishers. Instructions are either not given or hidden someplace (so that, technically, it’s all on the web, but, realistically, you can only find it if you invest a lot of time in it), a lot of vital information is never explained or can only be found if you sift through the “forum”. That’s another no-no for any website: If your clients can only find important information on the “forum” (aka it’s really provided by other - often disgruntled and/or semi-frustrated - customers) your service sucks. Seriously.
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This very well made documentary presents the story of The Ramones, and if you’ve never heard of The Ramones that’s an even better reason to watch it. Would you imagine the singer of a punk band to have severe OCD, or the guitar player to be a hard-core Republican, and would you imagine that those two people would not talk to each other any longer (while still playing in the same band for over 15 years) after the latter “stole” the former’s (only) girl friend (so that the former would then write a song about it: “The KKK took my baby away”)?
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“Neal Adams, Joe Kubert and Stan Lee have joined forces with a Holocaust expert to craft a comic that document the struggle of an Auschwitz survivor who painted watercolors to spare her mother’s life in the Nazi camp. The artist, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, 85, created a Disney mural in the children’s barracks at Auschwitz before being tapped by Dr. Josef Mengele to paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners. Babbitt cut a deal with the Nazi madman that spared her mother’s life in exchange for the paintings.” (source) You can see the comic as a pdf here or as separate web pages here.
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And speaking of villains, one of my Kurosawa favourites is…
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After reading this article about camera equipment I remembered this recent article about the internet and the brain; and I couldn’t help but wonder whether it’s the tools that change our brains, or whether it’s our brains that change themselves by deciding how to use the tools. That’s quite an important distinction, and I’d be quite happy to argue for the latter.
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I was going to pass on the election campaign this year, but this is too good to ignore it. Enjoy.
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Another must-read post by gallerist/blogger Ed Winkleman.
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It’s just a coincidence that I came across the following article today (while being engaged in presenting photography from Africa), but a very pleasant one. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that most Western people probably think of Africa as the place with lots of wild animals, starving people, and plenty of corrupt governments and nothing else. Africa’s rich cultural heritage is mostly unknown: “Fabled Timbuktu, once the site of the world’s southernmost Islamic university, harbors thousands upon thousands of long-forgotten manuscripts. A dozen academic instutions [sic!] from around the world are now working frantically to save and evaluate the crumbling documents. […] Most of the works stem from the late Middle Ages, when Timbuktu was an important crossroads for caravans. It was home to gold merchants and scholars, and it even boasted a university with 20,000 students.” (story)
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Some juicy new research I just couldn’t walk past (even though I dislike all kinds of sausages, meat or no meat): “According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of whether it’s soy-based or beef, says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. In fact, most people can’t even tell the difference between an ersatz vegan sausage and the real thing.” (source)
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When I first saw the disguise picked by Radovan Karadzic (left) to hide from the International War Crimes Tribunal, I was struck to see how similar his look was to former chess champion Robert “Bobby” Fisher’s (who had also been on the run from authorities, albeit for different reasons). Both one of the worst war criminals of our times and a chess champion turned raving lunatic decided to use the deranged Santa Claus look - and it’s quite interesting to see how people in both cases were extremely surprised when they finally got their glimpse of their man. Actually, one could probably Saddam Hussein’s disguise to the list.
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Godzilla of course is one of the best movie monsters of all times - my favourite certainly - and the early movies contain all the fun you can have (wonderful examples how a little imagination and a rubber suit easily beat today’s combination of a meagre imagination and computer effects). The only problem is that some of those movies contain just a bit too much of “Godzilla (or some other monsters) destroys some city” - after about five minutes you get the idea (no, really!). This is why “Godzilla versus the Sea Monster” stands out, because it is a genuinely good film (needless to say incl. a lot of the usual Godzilla-movie goofiness) with just enough monster fighting to make it a lot of fun (and Mothra stars in it, too!) Another great film is…
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Two good takes on the latest New Yorker cartoon (which, I’m sure, by now everybody has heard of): “So should we tread warily, lest we are misunderstood? Of course we should. Cartoonists are some of the most painstaking, careful, shy and sensitive people on earth, yet we do play with fire, toying with other people’s (and of course our own) most deeply held beliefs and most cherished illusions.” writes Steve Bell. And: “See, the Rude Pundit’s problem with the whole Barack-as-Muslim and Michelle-as-Black-Panther plus burning flag and bin Laden’s picture in the Oval Office isn’t that it’s particularly offensive. It’s that it’s just not very funny. It’s not even enough to make you go, ‘Hmmm.’ You glance at it once and think, ‘Yeah, some people think that, don’t they? That’s a shame.’ And there the whole joke ends. There’s no more levels to it. It’s like an Upper East Side version of South Park, an elitist attempt at crude humor, like an ironic fart at a wine tasting.” writes Lee Papa, aka “The Rude Pundit”.
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“Their story touched millions: the brave young marine who fought for his country and was left horribly disfigured. The high-school sweetheart who stood by his side. When we met them last year, their marriage was blossoming. But was the pressure to live happily ever after too much to bear?” story (photo by Nina Berman)
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“With a $3 trillion war bill and an economy that flounders as China’s soars, could America’s era of dominance on the world stage be coming to an end? Mick Brown and the photographer Alec Soth travelled across America and China to observe how the future of these two great nations is intertwined, and to find out whether, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and the US election, we are on the brink of a new world order. In the first of a four-part series, they meet army recruitment officers in Virginia and cadets at West Point.” Part 2: “Once symbolic of optimism and certainty, America’s credit-crunched suburbs may be facing a decline as dramatic as that of Detroit, itself once a beacon of industry.” (found via Colin Pantall’s blog) Part 3: “The thrusting tower blocks of Chongqing stand testament to the headlong economic growth that is changing the lives of millions of Chinese. Mick Brown and the photographer Alec Soth continue their investigation into the contrasting fortunes of the US and China by exploring the world’s fastest-growing city.” Part 4: “With the Beijing Olympics, China hopes to cement its position alongside the USA on the podium of global power. In the final part of their special investigation, Mick Brown and photographer Alec Soth examine how both nations are playing the Games.”
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Here’s an article about a photo show “curated” “by 3,344 self-selected people”. I think the experiment is interesting enough, but the underlying ideas - summarized in “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki - are a nice and inspiring read, but little more. It’s not very hard to see how the theory has tons of gaping holes (if the crowd was really so wise how come that George W. Bush was re-elected president in 2004 when it was already painfully obvious how incompetent he is? if the crowd is so wise how is it possible for stock- (or property-) market bubbles to develop? etc. etc.).
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As much as I detest (yes, detest) some of the architecture that went up in the 1960s and 70s - I mentioned brutalism earlier - when it comes to tearing it down I actually am very much opposed to it. There lately has been a discussion in Britain about a place called Robin Hood Gardens, a thoroughly disgusting piece of architecture, which, it has been determined, is not worth protecting (as “English Heritage”).
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“Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can […] be considered to have been rediscovered.” - story
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This one’s out on DVD.
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“Two narratives bound our era and, by degrees but unmistakably, our predicament: the story of consumerism and the story of globalization. In recent years, the two have combined to produce a single and singularly corrosive narrative. Consumerism has meant the transformation of citizens into shoppers, eroding America’s sovereignty from within; globalization has meant the transformation of nation-states into secondary players on the world stage, eroding America’s sovereignty from without. In collaboration, the trends are dealing a ruinous blow to democracy - to our capacity for common judgment, citizenship, and liberty itself.” - Benjamin Barber
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“For most people, photographing something that isn’t there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen. His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit — despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don’t exist. […] Satellites are just the latest in Paglen’s photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he’s snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, torture taxis (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.” (source)
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I didn’t find this article to be extremely convincing, but then I’m one of those types who reads books all the time, and I don’t let the internet replace what I’d otherwise read on paper. In any case, the article does pose a series of interesting questions.
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“Leipzig’s Gallery of Contemporary Art (GfZK) is facing strong criticism for hosting a series of exhibitions which gives dealers, collectors and corporate art collections complete freedom to display their works as they wish. Chris Dercon, the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, describes the initiative, entitled ‘Carte Blanche’, as ‘exactly the kind of thing that we do not need in public galleries’.” (story)
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Sure, I could post some poetry today or a quote, but instead I’ll hereby declare this Friday (and maybe all coming Fridays should I remember this) to be “Throw Out That Art! Day” (I can’t tell whether this is incredibly highbrow or amazingly lowbrow), starting with a smattering of stories I just found here: Chris Evans, the BBC Radio Two disc jockey, has accidentally thrown out a piece of artwork by Damien Hirst, and not just any piece, but one of his own: “Evans, 42, made the admission on his evening drive- time show, saying the print - worth thousands of pounds - was now lying in a charity shop waiting to be bought for a fraction of its true value. […] However, he did not seem to be worried about the potentially costly mistake, telling the story in fits of laughter.”
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Yearly budget of the National Endowment for the Arts if latest budget increase makes it through Congress: US$160,000,000 Daily cost of the Iraq war (source): US$341,400,000
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“I used to think that more people making images would necessarily lead to more conscious image reception, but I’m less sure of that now. It seems that it’s possible to make images as unconsciously as one consumes them, bypassing the critical sense entirely. One of the main culprits here is time pollution, or “the pollution of temporal distance” that Paul Virilio writes about. To regain our liberty (and our distance), we must slow the images down.” - David Levi Strauss
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“Coming from five generations of Ku Klux Klan members, 58-year-old ‘Ms. Ruth’ sews hoods and robes for Klan members seven days a week, blessing each one when it’s done. A red satin outfit for an Exalted Cyclops, the head of a local chapter, costs about $140. She uses the earnings to help care for her 40-year-old quadriplegic daughter, ‘Lilbit,’ who was injured in a car accident 10 years ago.” - story
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“Bill Henson is free to continue his internationally renowned photographic career without risk of jail but yesterday’s decision by NSW police to abandon its case against the Melbourne artist has done nothing to bridge the bitter divide between those who support his work and others who believe it is child pornography. […] NSW Law Society president Hugh Macken said the Henson photographs did not offend the Crimes Act because they did not show children in a sexual context. ‘There was never any prospect that these photos would fit the definition of child pornography and the decision of the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] vindicates that position,’ Mr Macken said. ‘Nudity is not obscenity.’” - story (my emphasis)
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Jake Rowland emailed me to tell me about his project Texas, New York City, which features photography and poetry. Well worth the visit!
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“Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. […] Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required. Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. […] Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?” - story
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I think it was former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who described the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with rockets”. It’s tempting to apply this to Australia and its big scandal about the photography of Bill Henson (see my earlier coverage and this nice overview) - “Massachusetts Bay Colony with computers”, but then that might be not that funny for all those Australians who are appalled by what’s going on (and it seems there’s a fair amount of those), plus it’s not like Australia is the only country that has recently witnessed a scandals like this one. Today, I spent a bit of time looking for what was going on in the press down there, and here’s a small selection.
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As mentioned earlier, the latest photographer to suffer from having a show shut down because of his photography of naked adolescents is Australian photographer Bill Henson. There is no single aspect of Bill’s case that is particularly new, but I personally find it somewhat frustrating (and, frankly, tiring) to see the same theme repeated over and over and over again, with the main problem being that there are no serious discussions about what is going on. Usually, there is some sort of investigation, and after that the conclusion is that there is no problem, and then we’re waiting for the next photographer to get harassed. Maybe this new article about the case can serve to illustrate some of the issues. Note how one of the big issues is actually mentioned by the first commenter whose assertion “The naked body is inevitably sexual in most contexts” points to the big underlying problem (which might explain why these kinds of scandals are way more common in some countries than in others). Update (28 May): The whole controversy is creating quite the stir down under: At the time of this writing, there are more than 1,000 articles about the case to be found via Google.
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This article is extremely interesting for a large variety of reasons, one of which is that it is very well and intelligently written and honest. It’s maybe the most useful and detailed discussion of comments on blogs I have seen in ages, with the money quote being “The real danger confronting criticism on the web is that, in the name of ‘anti-elitism’ and ‘the voice of the people’, real dissent (which looks elitist because it is rare) will be drowned out by posturing mobs.”
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“The opening night of an exhibition by the photographer Bill Henson featuring images of naked children was dramatically cancelled after police visited the Paddington gallery to investigate child pornography claims.” (story)
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I found this post at No Caption Needed today, which deals with racism and especially the kind of racism that people might not be aware of. Turns out I just read this excellent article, which mentions some research done on exactly this topic. Expect to see much more of this - and hopefully more smart discussions - over the next few months, given that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee.
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I admit I am quite fascinated by the phenomenon that is Flickr - for the most part, I suspect, because of all the things that might just happen there. The other day, I decided to have a look at what people were actually commenting on (using photos that have more than 30 comments), and then I got sucked into reading the comments. I realized that there were plenty of comments that made absolutely no sense to me if I tried too hard to understand what they actually meant, but that acquired a strange kind of beauty if taken by themselves. So I decided to compile some of them (usually picking the full comment, sometimes just picking a piece): Digital Fortune Cookies or The Poetry of Flickr. Enjoy!
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“Mrs. Sendler […] smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during the last three months before its liquidation. She found a home for each child. […] Mrs. Sendler listed the name and new identity of every rescued child on thin cigarette papers or tissue paper. She hid the list in glass jars and buried them under an apple tree in her friend’s backyard. Her hope was to reunite the children with their families after the war. Indeed, though most of their parents perished in the Warsaw Ghetto or in Treblinka, those children who had surviving relatives were returned to them after the war.” (source; also see this site)
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[Strictly speaking, this isn’t really a book review, even though you can treat it like one.] One of the things that I have been always interested in is how texts from antiquity made it into modern times, and I’ve always wanted to find out more about it. I thus got very excited when I came across The Archimedes Codex, a book that talks about the discovery and deciphering of a previously unknown text by Archimedes, who is widely believed to be one of the most important scientists to ever have lived on this planet (something I personally don’t care all that much about, but that’s just my personal bias).
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In case you’re curious to see the fashion contestants and winners (and some of Jessica Roberts’ fashion photos), check out this post for the winners and this post for the other contestants.
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“Giuseppe Verdi, one might think, is hard to mess up. But a theater in the eastern German city of Erfurt seems to be doing its best. In a re-interpretation of the opera ‘A Masked Ball,’ which opens on Saturday, director Johann Kresnik has hit upon a dramatic novelty: His staging has naked pensioners wearing Mickey Mouse masks, wandering around the ruins of New York’s World Trade Center.” (story) Notes the Daily Torygraph: “Rehearsals suggest that Mr Kresnik’s anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety.”
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