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Over the next 15 years, FBI agents closely tracked the grand and mundane aspects of the acclaimed novelist's life, according to previously confidential government files. Agents questioned his friends, scoured his passport file, thumbed through his best-selling books and circulated his photo among informants. They kept records on his appearances at writers conferences, talk shows and peace rallies. They noted the volume of envelopes in his mailbox and jotted down who received his Christmas cards. They posed as his friend, chatted with his father and more than once knocked on his door disguised as deliverymen.

Then the agents headed back to the office to file multiple copies of long reports stamped CLASSIFIED and SECRET and SUBV. CONTROL, apparently referring to a program to watch suspected subversives.

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jersey city pride


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Lopate: Not to get us too depressed, but can we talk about ground zero?

Huxtable: The first piece I wrote predicted what was going to happen. People thought I was clairvoyant. No, I’d just been watching the city for a long time. We all knew! The strange thing that came along was this small group of bereaved families, who really knew how to operate, and who did not speak for the rest of the group at all, but who began to roll over the politicians.

If there’s anything a politician will roll over for, it’s this kind of grief. After all the good things they vetoed or interfered with, cultural institutions like the Freedom museum because they were worried something unpatriotic might be exhibited there, they now have this memorial, and nobody has any concept how overscaled it is. A huge memorial, and these profit-making towers. Daniel Libeskind’s original architectural inspiration has been stripped away, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, got everything he wanted.

It is a horrible failure, as far as I’m concerned. We missed the chance to make a 21st-century Rockefeller Center.


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a certain apartment on a certain bucks county farm


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earth pigments


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English Heritage yesterday announced a grant to save arguably the most horrible building it has ever attempted to rescue, the sprawling Victorian hulk of Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, which housed the equally ramshackle geniuses who broke Germany's second world war codes.

"English Heritage isn't only concerned with great architectural set-pieces," its chief executive, Simon Thurley, said, announcing a £330,000 grant for urgent repairs, one of the largest such grants ever made by the organisation, on what he called "a fascinating group of buildings".

Sir Francis Richards, chairman of the Bletchley Park Trust, said: "It is hideous, but one can develop a fondness for the place. This grant comes in the nick of time; the roof is at its last gasp."

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lot of 970 steam paving machine images on ebay


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hollis frampton preview


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mary heilmann club chairs


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007
frank stella untitled 1956 mix


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Rothko was trying to revive the idea central to modernism - that art can shatter our assumptions. His Seagram murals remain the most challenging art in Tate Modern - because they demand your time, emotion, thought and commitment, only to throw these things back in your face, confronting the mind with a wall, a terminal chamber.

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1278


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not pollock
not pollock
marilyn
cow
not cow


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bilde

And architecture had Eliel and Eero Saarinen, the Finnish father-son duo who revolutionized the way people thought about buildings in the Modernist boom after World War II. Their plans for nine buildings at Drake University, which borrowed more elements from boxy factories than columned academia, identified the school as "a forward-looking, modern university that was committed to innovative design," according to Maura Lyons, who curated a new show about the architects that opens next weekend in the Anderson Gallery.

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The first time I met Enzo Mari, he was giving a talk at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It turned out to be more of a rant, as the great Italian designer railed scornfully against his pet hates. Design - dead. Architecture - dead too. Western civilization - ditto. Spotting the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas among the audience, he denounced him as "a pornographic window dresser."

Afterward I asked Mari if there was any aspect of contemporary life that pleased him. A lengthy silence followed, until he said: "Bread and terrorism." Why terrorism? "Why not?" snorted Mari. "People think it's bad, but if they thought about it, they'd realize it isn't all bad. It changes things."

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If Brad Cloepfil's new Museum of Arts and Design were simply another white box for art, it would be just plain mean not to give it a decent grade. It's humanly scaled, nicely detailed, and allows light to flutter into the galleries through strategically placed horizontal and vertical slits. Visitors get intimate bird's-eye views of Central Park and Columbus Circle, along with congenial spaces to contemplate art. It's a conscientious if unspectacular effort.

Yet it's impossible to forget that this decorous little tower was once something flamboyant, fun, and maybe even a little foolish, a swinging '60s art museum designed by Edward Durell Stone for the eccentric heir to the A&P fortune, Huntington Hartford.

Cloepfil and his team at Allied Works Architecture literally wrapped their new museum around the concrete bones of Stone's white marble folly. But they failed to exorcise its ghosts, and now they hover in eternal reproach. It feels as if all the idiosyncrasies were focus-grouped out of the place.

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barny is a nasty little shit. just like his dad


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Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.
you know there are two schools of thought on this.
Shirley concurs. “He calls me up every now and then, asks how I’m doing, and I say, ‘Good,’” she says, fond but firm. She is pleased to own an Eggleston photograph at home and proud of his success, but, like the Lamp’s regulars, her feelings for her famous neighbor are complicated. “I like Bill, but he can’t come in here. Will you be sure and tell him I said hello?”
his "pub crawl" documentary stranded in canton is excerpted here on you tube.

enjoy more of his work at eggleston trust website

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As I made my way through the 152 booths, I thought about the moment in Titanic when the designer of the doomed luxury liner warns Kate Winslet to find a lifeboat because "all this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic." When I tried this idea out on attendees, several said I was "a buzzkill." I asked, "Isn’t the buzz already beginning to disappear?"

If the art economy is as bad as it looks -- if worse comes to worst -- 40 to 50 New York galleries will close. Around the same number of European galleries will, too. An art magazine will cease publishing. A major fair will call it quits -- possibly the Armory Show, because so many dealers hate the conditions on the piers, or maybe Art Basel Miami Beach, because although it’s fun, it’s also ridiculous. Museums will cancel shows because they can’t raise funds. Art advisers will be out of work. Alternative spaces will become more important for shaping the discourse, although they’ll have a hard time making ends meet.

As for artists, too many have been getting away with murder, making questionable or derivative work and selling it for inflated prices. They will either lower their prices or stop selling. Many younger artists who made a killing will be forgotten quickly. Others will be seen mainly as relics of a time when marketability equaled likability. Many of the hot Chinese artists, most of whom are only nth-generation photo-realists, will fall by the wayside, having stuck collectors with a lot of junk.
moo moo >squeeeek clank< (sound of barn door closing)
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5138
Rothko No.43 (mauve) fails to sell


"crepuscular atmosphere"


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melik


malevich sold for record $60 million


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HF on ZH


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Theory and Design in the First Machine Age Reyner Banham


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HF: Well look, I think avant-garde culture historically needed a fairly confident bourgeoisie--not just to shock--but there was a way in which the bourgeoisie wanted to be tested too, wanted to see its values worked out another way.

BC: As Gombrich said they wanted a 'crunchy diet'.

HF: (Laughs) I think, you know, the classical idea of the avant-garde that we have now, of these extraordinary movements in Paris, they required a bourgeoisie that was informed enough to press them--the artists. I think there was a way in which a version of this relation is all that's needed. That's what I don't see. It doesn't come from the States, it doesn't come from a few rich people. I think there is enormous withdrawal from contemporary culture, just in general, for all kinds of reasons in the States. So those old conditions of avant-garde culture have to be replaced by other ones. Whatever the other conditions are they're never particularly happy--there's too much state; not enough; too much private interest; not enough. These are all in there by default. By default of a self-critical bourgeoisie.

PS: Presumably we're talking about a notion of the avant-garde. Something that one wants to bring with this notion is the idea of political change. Not simply a new set of artists who happen to be the ones who get discussed in all the articles for a while. You want something that's more 'radical' for want of a better word.

HF: Yeah. The avant-garde, again, is this term that in the past articulated the artistic and the political. I don't think that necessarily you go seek out the political in this neighbourhood or that province. I don't think it's ready-made in any community. I think sometimes it happens in form. I'm modernist enough to believe that you can still be political within the materiality of your own work.

PS: Well in a sense it has to be in terms of art practice, that's what it must be surely. Otherwise it's just politics layered on.

HF: Yeah, like it's illustrational. There's a lot of problems: there's theory illustration, there's political expressionism. There's lots of problematic formulations it seems to me right now. Maybe the pressure to form all these things together in work that is also innovative in its own terms is too much to ask.

BC: The grand unification theory of the avant-garde.

HF: I don't think that's a grand theory--it can't be guessed beforehand, I think it happens.

PS: But that's a very different position from a modernist position of De Stijil or some sort of group like that, where they're trying to make the future happen in a certain way.

HF: No, that's beyond us, thank God.

BC: You're talking about the rediscovery of past artworks. I think there's an industry about destroying people's reputations, but even just re-readings. One is constantly surprised though by the facts. I remember finding out that Jackson Pollock's tutor was Thomas Hart Benton. Early on you'll see Pollock making these big floats for political demonstrations with stereotypical capitalist effigies. Then again you have this thing that when the state did intervene in the arts in America with the WPA, that gave rise to this massive grouping which was then again taken up by the state through the Congress for Cultural Freedom and all that: it was done twice. Is that what you long for?

HF: (Laughs) Not exactly. I don't see the early work of Pollock as that divorced from the later work. For me there's not a huge divide between those moments in Pollock. There is a moment where the political, the aesthetic and the institutional come together in the work. It's obviously canonical, classical now, but there's a way in which Pollock really knew where painting was at that moment. He saw that innovation in form could also be political in the sense that there was still enough of a structure to old ideas of painting that if they were messed with, that would have political ramifications. I think it did, liberating ones at least. That's an example, obviously a very privileged one, but I don't think it's unique and I don't think it will never come again.

BC: It's fundamentally presented as some kind of aesthetic leap, as if it's some sort of scientific breakthrough. If you look at his work, OK he does break, but he's also coming back to something, it's still drawing.

HF: But not at that time. Smithson is another example of a person who 'leapt' in this league, gathered up all these different forces in ways that could not be expected. Those are two heroic examples, I think you could find humble ones too.

LF: The thing about photography and the use of attempts at justification through the use of a painterly language: Pollock talking about drawing or anything else can be as much about a sense of justification--in the same way that photography went through, and still is.

BC: But it's also very, very hyped. That film he made, the Time magazine article. And it's the same with Duchamp and the urinal: who took the photograph?--Stieglitz. Who's show was it?--Stieglitz's, he put up the money. Duchamp even wrote the 'scandalous' article. What did he set up afterwards? The Société Anonyme--taking all that money from little old ladies and ambassador's wives (laughter). I'm not condemning it, don't get me wrong, I'm drooling with jealousy. But there has to be these readings too.

HF: (Laughs) Oh sure.

BC: Lets not get too romantic about it.

HF: Oh I'm not romantic about it at all. That's what I meant about my longing for a proper bourgeoisie. It may sound absolutely perverse but...

PS: It's like Hegel's master slave dialectic, you need a bogeyman to have an avant-garde.

BC: Well look at those Yves Klein photographs, the ones with the naked women and that extraordinary audience.

HF: Yeah, there was a great moment when Benjamin Buchloch, in October, a long time ago, reproduced the image of Klein's audience with Malevitch and Lissitzky and students headed to Moscow, and this very different sense of a practice collective etc. His whole deal, Benjamin's, was a before and after: this is real collectivity and this is spectacle. But there's a way in which this is true. That's his story--of massive precipitous decline, you know. I think the other way is to see other possibilities. I think it's important to be grim, as grim as possible, but there's always possibilities.

PS: Because if there weren't presumably culture really would be sewn up by the powers at be.

HF: Yeah and we can all go home.

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