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"the thing" bank


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Indianapolis shotgun house five thousand dollars

thx justin
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BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE

Le Corbusier: A Life
by Nicholas Fox Weber
Knopf, 821 pp., $45.00

The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as Lecturer
by Tim Benton
Birkhäuser, 247 pp., $99.00 (to be published in May)

The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, 1920–1930
by Tim Benton
Birkhäuser, 272 pp., $69.95

Le Corbusier and the Maisons Jaoul
by Caroline Maniaque Benton
Princeton Architectural Press, 175 pp., $40.00

Le Corbusier and Britain: An Anthology
edited by Irena Murray and Julian Osley
RIBA Trust/Routledge, 344 pp., $62.95

Le Corbusier Le Grand
edited by Phaidon editors, with an introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen and
chapter introductions by Tim Benton
Phaidon, 768 pp., $200.00

Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture
an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, February 19–May 24,
2009
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Alexander von Vegesack, Stanislaus von
Moos, Arthur Rüegg, and Mateo Kries.
Vitra Design Museum/NAI/RIBA Trust, 398 pp., $168.00

Le Corbusier and the Occult
by J.K. Birksted
MIT Press, 405 pp., $44.95


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allison arieff has a fluff column in the NYT (by design opinion blog) allowing the extended design community (including designer, manufacturer, retailer, advertising and news media) to wiggle out of a history of championing design irresponsibility. again the column is B.S. but the COMMENTERS (the consumers) GET IT (heres just one):

Our consumer-driven society is precisely why “toothbrushes can’t be designed to last longer”–if they do, then the manufacturers don’t make money on us buying new ones every few months.

That downturn in endurability is something that’s happened, visibly, within the past two generations. I’m thirty-five, and my mother had small appliances–a sewing machine, an electric mixer, things of that nature–which lasted for twenty or more years. The sewing machine, in fact, lasted so long that when it finally broke, they hadn’t been making replacement parts for years. Even early lightbulbs would burn virtually indefinitely, rather than going dark after a few hundred hours. Very few modern appliances have that kind of shelf life, and from a manufacturing point of view, that’s a design feature, not a flaw.

The idea of “heirloom design” is obviously a winning one, but my fear is that a toothbrush designed to last won’t find its way onto the shelves, and if it does, it’ll be a specialty item that costs three times as much as the competition. Even in good economic times, that’s daunting.

I don’t know if America’s come far enough for that paradigm shift, the one where we fall away from being conspicuous consumers. I certainly hope so; the result would be better for us and for the world. But we’ve proven to have embarrassingly short memories in the aftermath of previous economic woes, and I’m afraid that we’ll return to laissez les bon temps roulez at the slightest opportunity.
read all 68 of 'em. most express their disgust. i smell consumer revolution in the air. i wonder if the NYT is rethinking this comments feature thing yet...


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40/4 chair $109.95


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"Hiccup, burp, cha cha cha" Just forgot the rest of the joke.
ok this joke research is going nowhere


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nice to see "Adjustable Wall Bra" by Vito Acconci (, plaster, steel, canvas, electrical lightbulbs, and audio equipment) has found a home in Bade Stageberg Cox's Art Cave. sure wish archinect had bothered to credit all of the artists in the architectural showcase posting. about the Stones.


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k14941


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Test Cell

testcelm

Will Chicago tear down this Mies van der Rohe building?


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down with dubai


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30 ways to die from electrocution / #1 pee on a live wire

via wfmu blog
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populuxe books / furniture division (note generous previews)

how to make a calder mobile


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The Sounds of American Tropical Rain Forest (SFW CD 6120), produced in 1952 by the American Museum of Natural History, is rumored to have been recorded in a New York City shower.
smithsonian folkways 24 x 1 hour podcasts (that should take you all day to listen to) / thx adman
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24893
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775lot


Lot: 775
MARIO DAL FABBRO Prototype side table with two-tiered ash laminate tops, one stained, on black enameled metal base. 25" x...
$3,000 - $5,000

rago modern auction apr 25 26


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iTunes offers free John Cage: 4'33


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cr w/ alh


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open source multimachine

thx jim
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haags hotel shartlesville pa monthly from $450


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rip robert delford brown

A colleague of artists like Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Nam June Paik, Mr. Brown was a central figure in the anarchic New York art scene of the early 1960s, a participant in — and instigator of — events-as-art known as “happenings.” He saw the potential for aesthetic pronouncement in virtually everything. His métier was willful preposterousness, and his work contained both anger and insouciance.

His raw materials included buildings, pornographic photos and even meat carcasses. He often performed in the persona of a religious leader, but dressed in a clown suit with a red nose and antennas hung with ripe bananas. In the end his message to the world was that both spirited individualism and unimpeded creativity must triumph.
hat tip t moody
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aa076


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the wrecking crew


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gene swenson and the new american sign painters

Henry Geldzahler, a precocious curator at the Metropolitan Museum and art-world gadfly, particularly piqued his jealous ire. Swenson notoriously sent the museum a funeral wreath bearing the name “Henry” and challenged the curator to a $10,000 riddle, but Geldzahler didn’t take the bait. On another occasion, Rosenquist remembers Swenson loitering outside a party thrown for Rosenquist at Rauschenberg’s studio by collectors Ethel and Robert Scull. Once invited inside, Swenson eyed a huge temporary chandelier and asked how many people it would crush if its ropes were cut; the alarmed hosts had him tailed all night in case he tried to find out. By this point, according to his friend Bill Wilson, “Gene had assumed the pathos of the creative person whose madness has ceased to be funny.”

Petty jealousies and professional disappointments aside, Swenson’s beef with the art world became increasingly motivated by an all-consuming moral and political zeal. As America plunged deeper into racial strife and Vietnam he was dismayed that his fellow writers and artists were unwilling to join him on the barricades. Although he had abandoned the insular debates of the art magazines, in the spring of 1968 he published four pieces in the liberal tabloid New York Free Press, newspaper home to Abbie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver. In articles such as “The Corporate Structure of the American Art World” and “Why Have None of My Fellow Artists Spoken a Word in Behalf of the Revolution?,” Swenson decried the funding of museums by “the economic dictatorship” and scoffed at handouts from “‘enlightened’ despots” while suggesting a guaranteed annual wage for artists. Taking aim at his colleagues’ political complacency, he wrote, “We of the art world have been wearing our responsibilities too lightly these days. This frivolity will live in the pages of history as The Shame of the Artists.” Privately Swenson gave Rosenquist the silent treatment for allowing his work to “serve the government” at the São Paulo Bienal, and publicly he accused his old friend of taking the “ostrich position.” In a particularly vicious swipe, he branded fellow critic Barbara Rose “our Marie Antoinette, with all that implies.”

Swenson supplemented his political writing with acts of public protest, including a fiery speech outside the Leo Castelli gallery, and he was arrested twice, which gave him great pride. In February 1968 he began his daily picketing of MoMA, carrying his blue question mark. Apparently out of fear that he might damage the art, museum officials banned his entrance. Swenson staged his last and most poignant act of defiance against the museum on the occasion of William Rubin’s exhibition “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” MoMA’s first comprehensive look at the movements since 1936. Rather than applaud his beloved Surrealism’s ascent into the ivory tower, Swenson railed against the museum alongside other critics, such as Nicolas Calas, who lamented the art’s symbolic castration at the hands of a formalist curator more concerned with his subject’s stylistic taxonomy than its seditious sex appeal. Swenson took out unsigned ads in the Village Voice “dedicated to the lost but not forgotten spirit of Dada and Surrealism” and invited readers to “join Les Enfants du Parody” outside the “Mausoleum Of Modern Art” on the night of the exhibition’s private preview. Nearly three hundred sloganeering demonstrators heeded the call to arms and gathered at MoMA’s entrance, which was guarded by crash-helmeted members of New York’s Tactical Patrol Force. On hand for the opening, Salvador Dalí wryly quipped to the New York Times, “I’m very proud of the hippies. . . . But, unfortunately, many of the young people today have no information. Dada was a protest against the bourgeoisie, yes—but by the aristocracy, not by the man in the street.” So much for radical idealism.

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Like a classic Mexican standoff, the market for blue-chip art has come to a virtual standstill. The storyline goes something like this: The only speculators/collectors willing to sell want yesterday’s prices. The only speculators/collectors open to buying want today’s prices. That being the case, precious few deals are getting done.

With the price declines at last November’s auctions, collectors and dealers alike were licking their chops at the thought of scooping up art at 50 cents on the dollar. Fear was in the air. Prior to the sale, auction house experts were actually telling collectors (off the record) what it would take to secure certain guaranteed paintings. After the sale, Sotheby’s and Christie’s public relations departments did their best to put a positive spin on the results. But veteran collectors weren’t buying it. They were too busy plotting how to get that $5 million Mark Rothko painting on paper for only $2.5 million -- or less.

On a personal level, my first thought was that my Andy Warhol green Fright Wig that I sold for $375,000 in May, 2005 -- which would have been valued at several million dollars during the market’s acme (London sales of June 2007) -- was back to being worth around $375,000 again. These thoughts were confirmed by the recent results brought by a triumvirate of small "Fright Wig" paintings that averaged a little over $400,000 apiece, at Sotheby’s February 2009 sales in London.
the reality is warhols freight wig paintings were never blue-chip to begin with, that is if blue-chip still confers important work.
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