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kley6


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sc4


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The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of “The Republic.” There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations — by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls “ideas,” the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only know how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter’s knowledge is higher than the artist’s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body or, more strenuously, bodies locked in love. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist’s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances.

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beach refuge: water tank tower, shipping container, tents


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jack lenor larson

marimekko

via reference library
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trains and boats and planes

Screens, Buses, Kegs, and Cranes


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greg allen's prince cowboy


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papalotes de colores - mexican pavilion, shanghai expo 2010


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chew MAIL POUCH tobacco barn paintings

We found a barn in Washington County, Pennsylvania with tall and narrow lettering. I asked Harley Warrick about the unusual lettering and he said, "The letters are just like Don Shires, the person who painted it, "tall and skinny." Another barn in Ritchie County, West Virginia is located on a seldom-traveled road and owned by a retired schoolteacher. I asked her why Mail Pouch would advertise in this location and she explained that "I was a friend of Samuel Bloch," one of the Mail Pouch owners.

Over the years Mail Pouch barns have the tendency to "ghost." This occurs after the barn has been painted many times. But why do some barns "ghost" and not others? Most barns were painted by Harley Warrick and he told a fellow barn hunter, Lonnie Schnauffer, that it was just as easy to cover the old sign and start with a new painting. I wonder why more barns don't "ghost." I imagine this question will never be satisfactorily answered.

My wife Thelma and I always check barns for initials and dates. This tells who painted the barn last and the year. The initials are usually found on the blue border although previously initials were located near the roof so that the eaves gave protection from the weather. The most common initial we find is "HW" for Harley Warrick. We also find "MT" which I believe is Mark Turley. "RW", "DM" and "TN" are initials we only found once. The barns with legible dates indicate most barns were painted every three to four years.

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deep water horizon response


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the painters palette

via things
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This book does a fabulous job of fleshing out Smith's life and work, for those who are unfamiliar with him, or who like myself, simply knew him as the compiler of the AAFM, a work that would inspire a host of folk music revivalists in the 1960's, not least of whom was Bob Dylan. Understanding Smith's obsessions with collecting and pattern-discovery shed some light on the origins and meaning of the AAFM. The story of the AAFM as it is described here is that Smith was commissioned by Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records to assemble a compilation of folk music. Smith, in essence became a deejay, selecting tracks from his massive library of 78's. The tracks he selected were from records produced "between 1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the depression halted folk music sales" (30). His primary selection criteria were songs that were odd or exotic "in relation to what was considered to be the world culture of high class music" (30).

Smith, the authors included in this volume observe, was the quintessential modernist - living and working largely in isolation. Thus, Greil Marcus is led to characterize the AAFM as Smith "imposing his oddness, his own status as one who didn't belong and who may not even have wanted to, his own identity as someone unlike anyone else and someone who no one else would want to be, on the country itself" (184). This imposition, when added on top of the record companies' original commodification of folk music, was undoubtedly the death blow to folk music as a phenomena of local culture. Marcus describes it in this way:

In folk music, as it was conventionally understood when Smith did his work, the song sung the singer. The song embodies tradition; the singer's body was simply the vehicle that delivered the song. He or she could not intervene in the song, or in the story or predicament it described. The performance was not an event; when the song played, there was no history. But Smith's work is modernist: the singer sings the song (184).

It comes as little surprise, then, that the oddity embodied in the AAFM was embraced by the counterculture movement of the 1950's and 1960's. The peculiarity once representative of particular places and people became a commodity that could be sold and purchased as a sign of one's oddness. Robert Cantwell describes the ultimate conquest of the AAFM: "[Its] color blindness....is only an aspect of a more comprehensive effacement that yields up an imagined people of no-race, no-time, no-place" (199). This triad of "no-race, no-time, no-place" has, of course, become familiar to us today as a fundamental and oppressive falsehood of modern global consumerism.

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cool water


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“Photography is an art for lazy people.” So said Robert Frank, the celebrated Swiss photographer, to Allen Ginsberg, the celebrated New Jersey poet, as they gathered in a Lower East Side flat to make a movie. Frank was at the height of his fame after publishing his monumental collection of photographs, “The Americans,” but had newly re-imagined himself as a beatnik and filmmaker. Also assembled in that apartment were Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and an ensemble cast of hangers-on, lovers, admirers, and jazzmen, ready to conceive another erratic self-portrait.

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just south of easton right off the canal and delaware river. 36.5k (55 and over community) sattelite view


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ss4753


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photomontage


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the primacy of matter / rehabilitating mud


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A grip needs to be gotten here.


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For the first time in 55 years, Philip Johnson's first commissioned residential home is up for sale. The famed modern architect, known for his inventive use of glass, designed and built this Bedford, N.Y., property known as the Booth House in 1946.

The two-story home with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the surrounding woodlands was a precursor to Mr. Johnson's iconic Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., built in 1949.


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(communist era) bone light


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rip peter orlovsky


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