paintings + drawings

Warhol's Michael Jackson Silkscreen On The Block

From the Thriller-era Jackson (1984), the painting's estimate was $700,000. Bidding closed at $812,500.

Meanwhile, Tunafish Disaster, a favorite of mine, did not sell.

I guess celebrity death still trumps corporate negligence.

On Ballard And The Arts

Jonathan Lethem in the NY Times:

"Every bit as striking as Ballard’s feeling for entropy is his engagement with arts from which literature too often seems quarantined: music, sculpture, painting, architecture. He evokes artistic creation with the passion of an exile for a lost kingdom. Like his scientific characters, Ballard’s overreaching artists glimpse seeds of doom at the heart of their endeavors. And in perhaps his most famous vision, the novel “Crash,” technology, sculpture, sex and death recede to the same vanishing point: the permanently contemporary site of the car crash."

Zizek on Obama and National Healthcare

with Jonathan Derbyshire in Newstatesman:

"(L)egitimate power is not the topic I focus on. I don't despise democracy, but for me, although democracy, in the formal sense, is precious, it is not in itself a measure of ultimate truth or authenticity. We shouldn't fetishize democracy - after all, you can have democratic elections where the majority votes for a rightist populist, and when it does, you have the right to treat the government as illegitimate. I don't think that this formal electoral procedure should be taken as equaling legitimacy...

I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it. Do whatever is possible. This is why I support Obama. I think the battle he is fighting now over healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The core of the campaign against Obama is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is that freedom of choice is certainly something beautiful, but that it only works against a background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. My position isn't that we should sit down and wait for some big revolution to come. We have to engage wherever we can. If Obama wins his battle over healthcare, if some kind of blow can be struck against the ideology of freedom of choice, it will have been a victory worth fighting for."

R.I.P. Claude Lévi-Strauss

Dead at age 100.

From the NY Times obit:

"In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.

Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

A High Line For The Bay Area

Instead of tearing down the old Bay Bridge span, the NY Times (and some architecture students) suggest turning it into open space. Sure, what a swell idea. After all the High Line is really cool.

But here's the rub, we are not going to use that span anymore because it is seismically unsafe. Remember Loma Prieta?

If you think walking across a dilapidated bridge is more neat than dangerous, then more info on your post-apocalyptic fantasy is here.

 

photo: USGS

Make Your Collection Halloweenie-ish

A few easy tips from Nayland Blake (via MAN) on how to "Charlie Brown" an object in your painting collection for the holidays. Let me just add if you want the true loser look, remember Charles had more than twenty eye holes cut into his sheet.

photo credit: B.I.Y. 002 “Art Ghost”

R.I.P. Roy DeCarava

Dead at age 89. 

From the NY Times: "Over a career spanning almost 70 years, Mr. DeCarava — who fiercely guarded how his work was exhibited and whose visibility in the art world remained low for decades — came to be regarded as the founder of a school of African-American photography that broke with the social documentary traditions of his time. While an outspoken crusader for civil rights, he felt that his pictures would speak louder as a record of black life in America if they abandoned the overtly humanist aims of mentors like Edward Steichen.

“I do not want a documentary or sociological statement,” he wrote in his application for a Guggenheim fellowship, which he won in 1952, becoming the first black photographer to do so. His goal, he explained, was instead “a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret….

“One of the things that got to me,” Mr. DeCarava said in an interview with The New York Times in 1982, “was that I felt that black people were not being portrayed in a serious and in an artistic way.”

R.I.P. Lawrence Halprin

Dead at age 93.

From the SF Chronicle obit:

"Mr. Halprin's persona was every bit as exuberant as the cascading water features found in many of his parks - whether it was his 1969 arrest to protest a flood-control project on Tamalpais Creek in Marin, or his 1968 pronouncement that if a fountain by Armand Vaillancourt in Mr. Halprin's large plaza at the foot of Market Street didn't turn out to be one of the nation's "great works of civic art ... I am going to slit my throat."

Not all of Mr. Halprin's work was embraced by the public. Vaillancourt Fountain, with its contorted concrete piping, remains controversial. Spaces designed by Mr. Halprin in several cities have been altered or closed, and his U.N. Plaza on Market Street is known more for social problems than its sculptural air.

But Mr. Halprin's ambitious desire to reshape cities earned him lasting respect from other designers.

"When he hit it, he hit it, and you can't say that for any of his peers," said Frank Gehry, America's best-known living architect, who designed the 1986 exhibition on Halprin's career at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "He saw there was a need for a new way to express the (urban) landscape at the end of the 20th century."

Two New Skateboards

and a mug.

All work great as weapons.

Buy now.

On The Internet Continuing To Raise The Dead

Anne Frank is on Youtube.

From the official Anne Frank channel: "July 22 1941. The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor. The Anne Frank House can offer you this film footage thanks to the cooperation of the couple."