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"Two new and serious studies attempt the work of making Leonardo earthbound again. “Leonardo” (Oxford; $26), by the Oxford art-history professor Martin Kemp, is a summary of a life’s research; “Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind” (Viking; $32.95), by the biographer and historian Charles Nicholl, is a popular account, dense with social history and rational, high-hearted speculation. The simultaneous appearance of the books doubtless created two anxious publishers, but they complement each other almost perfectly: Kemp’s is Leonardo seen from the inside out, Nicholl’s from the outside in. Kemp explains Leonardo’s principles of design and his theory of the world from an intense knowledge of his mind and drawings; Nicholl shows where his ideas came from and who paid to subsidize them, through a broad rendering of his life and times."


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ac danto on moma


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edible architecture


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The Miami Design Preservation League celebrates its 28th annual Art Deco Weekend with the theme "Art Deco and the New Deal." The event was created to raise awareness of the Art Deco era (roughly 1925-1945) and attract visitors to Miami Beach's historic district. South Beach no longer needs any added attention, but Miami loves any excuse to party. This year's festival salutes the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the "New Deal" government agencies that created public works in the Thirties. The WPA employed eight million people during the Depression and produced a stunning collection of literature, photography, art, and architecture. The weekend's schedule of films, lectures, and entertainment will give props to the WPA and its contributions to the Art Deco landscape of Miami Beach.


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daytona beach florida


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the great neon signs of las vegas


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the relay project


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"In the final section, "The Contextualized City -- A Computerized Symbiosis," we see contemporary visions of the future -- ever-grander projects, including "smart houses" controlled by computers. A foreboding thought is that these models may reflect the way we think we want to live, in the same manner the one-piece molded plastic room and modular houses represented the way people thought they wanted to live back in the 1950s. As someone who has suffered with a "unit bath," I would suggest we be careful what we wish for -- we might get it."


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what happened to the architectects newspaper ? their online main page was last updated 11.16.2004.


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ARTHUR DANTO
"Art Criticism After the End of Art"


Tuesday January 18 2005
Doors: 6:30, Lecture: 7:00
Space is limited, PLEASE email info@swissinstitute.net to reserve your entry




Arthur Danto is an American analytic philosopher and art critic who has spent the last half century teaching at Columbia University and has been an art critic for The Nation since 1984. In his role as philosopher, author, and art critic for The Nation, Arthur Danto has been a major shaper of recent aesthetic theory. He is best known for a contemporary version of Hegel's "end of art" thesis, first ennunciated by Danto in a 1984 essay called "The End of Art", and developed most recently in his After the End of Art (Princeton University Press, 1997). His numerous book credits include the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award winner Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present and The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (2000).


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"To further disconcert the public, the artists distributed a document which simply described the works displayed, refusing any commentary other than the “slogan” of the first event, which indeed had been staged with methods close to those used in advertising to launch a new product. The slogan was: “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni are not exhibiting” (my emphasis). As Michel Claura would write during the fourth and last showing of this short-lived group, in the catalogue of the Fifth Paris Biennial in September 1967, for which the paintings reentered the galleries they had so hurriedly left a few months before: “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni are the deliberate abandonment of sensibility, which has always been the attraction and driving force of art. All of Buren’s canvases – and the same holds for those of Mosset, of Parmentier, of Toroni – are identical. There is no more notion of perfectibility. Any search for an illusion would be in vain. A painting thus “reduced” is neither all nor nothing. Neither comfort or unease should be sought in these paintings. There is no communication. The spectator is left alone with himself. The contact with the artwork has lost its principle “quality”: its property as an emollient... The painting of Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni does nothing but exist.” [8] The four artists will separate on 5 December 1967.


Marcel Duchamp, who had witnessed the group’s third showing with some perplexity, passed away in October 1968, after having watched the students strike out against a society whose shortcomings he knew so well. The ideological agitation of Paris Spring had led to the creation of people’s studios at the School of Fine Arts and the School of Decorative Arts, whose productions are still on sale sometimes. No doubt more significant was the publication of Dubuffet’s book Asphyxiante culture [9] and of Jean Baudrillard’s Système des objets, is which consumption is defined as a “total idealist practice, which far exceeds our relations to objects and our relations among individuals, one that extends to all manifestations of history, communication and culture.”[10] These efforts to question habits of thought and vision, in which the world of representation counts for more than the representation of the world, could not help but lead artists toward more extreme avenues of research, allowing for a new apprehension of the artwork. At the same moment, Arte Povera was born in Italy with the action of Germano Celant, while in the United States, Joseph Kosuth and Mel Bochner were laying the foundations of “Conceptual Art”. One of the few French representatives of this latter group, Bernar Venet, himself lived in New York at the time, where he was creating mathematical diagrams."


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7070






"Mosset moves to New York in 1977 and begins to paint monochrome paintings that deal with abstraction as silence, mutism and ineloquence. It seems that Mosset has reached a logical end point of painting, in the sense that it is difficult to imagine what can follow from his line of reasoning without crossing the line between art and non-art, excluding the thorny but brilliant interposition of Duchamp's readymade. This is perhaps not a unique occurrence in the history of art. Rodchenko's Red, Yellow, Blue or Ryman's white paintings are also logical end points. Mosset does not demarcate the limits of painting, however, because he has something fundamental to say about the process and result of painting, and is thus in some sense at the centre of it all, rather than at the edges.





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ken hiratsuka


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chainsaw school of art



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Eerie occurrences in a hugely popular computer game have been traced to rogue computer code accidentally spread between players like an infectious illness.


The Sims 2, released in September 2004, lets players assume godlike powers in a virtual community populated by characters they have created. They can influence the behaviour and fortunes of their characters in a huge variety of ways and sit back to witness the outcome.


The second edition of the game has already proven extremely popular and adds an extra dimension by enabling players to trade items, characters, even whole buildings through an online swap shop called The Sims 2 Exchange.


But in November 2004 several players began complaining that the characters and even some inanimate objects in their lovingly built worlds had begun behaving oddly. Some noticed that characters no longer aged while others found magical items - like an espresso maker that gives its user unlimited happiness - inexplicably installed in their character's homes.

[...]


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banned in the usa


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"My dad had an acoustic guitar when I was a kid and it was an endless source of mirth in our household to start singing Hard Day's Night immediately after anyone dropped the guitar or otherwise accidentally strummed the open strings."


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 It was at Nagy's storefront gallery that Bleckner held his pivotal 1984 show, in which he displayed just one large painting, which combined text and abstraction. "There was a whole discourse about the process of making art the Halley and Ashley Bickerton and Sherrie Levine had reopened," remembers dealer Pat Hearn. "For Ross to use that painting was really clever." When Sonnabend Gallery brought together four East Village artist-Halley, Vaisman, Jeff Koons, and Bickerton-for its infamous 1986 "Neo-Geo" show, Bleckner's coterie was suddenly on top, and Bleckner, whose work was always more sensual than intellectual, more incidental than theoretical, ended up riding on the coattails of Neo-Geo, an aridly ideological movement rooted in half-understood ideas of structuralism.



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JK: Neo-geo felt like every five years the art world wants a new art world, a new emergence, new artists. Was there really a neo-geo? I don't think so.



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CS: I didn't think of it as appropriation, that idea hadn't crystallized at the time. All those ideas that came down, and continue to come down--I never really gave a thought to them until I read them. In the later '80s, when it seemed like everywhere you looked people were talking about appropriation--then it seemed like a thing, a real presence. But I wasn't really aware of any group feeling. It was a pretty competitive time. It wasn't just photographers or appropriation artists versus painters; there were so many different factions--the Mary Boone artists versus the Metro Pictures, the neo-geo...


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my dad used to occasionally say "Dirty Rackafratz!" instead of cussing in front of us kids. there were only two google hits with "Dirty" included in the search and two pages for "Rackafratz" alone. no real leads on the origin. i have no idea where he got that from. he was a big Walt Kelly fan so it might of come from Pogo. I first came accross variations on &*?#@ in comics, probably Mad. could have started in krazy kat or prior.


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affordable housing reader



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RP: The "Joke" paintings are abstract. Especially in Europe, if you can't speak English.


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S: That great White Columns show. It happened with the devotion and commitment of Eugene Schwartz, as curator, and the churning openness of Bill Arning, the director. Together we produced a show of high intensity and polemics that jolted and bounced in all directions. Fortunately the appropriationists were hanging out at the time, which gave me a whole new space for potent dialogue. This was very crucial, as it allowed entry into the work by negative definition--a valid, powerful position. Then again, the appropriationists made me a precursor, although refusing to be jammed into that category immediately put me back in hot water. The dynamic difference was that Sherrie Levine, leading the pack, brilliantly used the copy as a political strategy, whereas the force of my work lies in the premise that thought is power. What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassem ble, recombine-that's the way to go.


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