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offending the audience


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obscura antiques east 10th nyc

via vz
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ruins in the hudson / scout ny

via justin
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rose murphy the best things in life


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jbabd


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something for everybody


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carl plansky

I first met Carl over a sales counter at the David Davis’s art supply store then on LaGuardia Place in the early 1970s where he was working. I think he was recharging his batteries after Joan. Carl and I talked freely over that counter, mostly about art materials but sometimes about David Davis’s bad breath from the beans he always ate for lunch or maybe about the hooded figure who worked for David in the basement, who seemed to be able to cross a room from shadow to shadow without moving his feet. But mostly, I listened to the vastness of Carl’s knowledge and experience with oil paint. Old Holland and Blockx were still around and they were the best paints. Carl had a way of revealing his knowledge in such a casual, generous, and totally unpretentious way. He would say, “Well, you could do that, but maybe try this and see if it doesn’t work a little better.” Everything he suggested I did and yes, it did work better.
williamsburg oil paints

soho art materials / stretchers and panels

amien - artists materials information and education


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harry shearer le show / listen to his latest broadcasts or dig through the archives


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bob "dady-o" wade's lone star cafe iguana finds new home back on the range

via adman
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These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
via wfmu blog
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h2bd

BURGOYNE DILLER: Apparently, New York City had been voted a certain amount, or rather, granted a certain amount of money. A certain budgetary limitation was set up, but the funds would become available. Now understand, this means money to be spent. Therefore, you had to have people working to earn that money, and this comes to putting people to work. When I was called in there, it was an extraordinary situation because the thing had been just started in that past month or so, and what we were doing -- our job was to put people to work. But we had a doublefold responsibility. You can't put people to work at nothing. The only thing you could do immediately was to say, "Well here, try experimenting with some mural ideas," if you felt the man was capable of this work. You see, the work was submitted to a committee, and it was decided whether he could be an easel painter. Now that's easy. We all can paint, you see. Or a sculptor, you know -- "go off and prepare some sketches for a sculpture." You could put them to work immediately, but in a division like the mural division or architectural sculpture, it was a different thing, because we had to get the sponsorship of public institutions in order to assign anything. Those people we felt were more immediately able to start developing projects we assigned to just general thinking about the things, about the mural, because don't forget, very few men had had the opportunity of working on walls. We felt that if they just exercised a little bit until we could find them a sponsor, you see, why we'd be that much up on the game. I know that in my case it was a question of spending half the day, you know, on the committee, accepting the artists, enrolling them and assigning them to what I thought was reasonable that would help in the total picture that was developing. Then the other half or more of your time was spent in going out to city agencies and talking with people in public libraries and so on and having them request a mural. Now the commitment at the time on their part was really that they would have the mural. They could order a mural through the head of the department, through their agency and, as in the high school, for instance, if they were a grade school or a high school, or whatever, you'd have to go through the Board of Education and have the Board of Education make the request. But the original request came from the school itself. So we'd have to talk to the school principals and so on and say, "Well here, we've looked at your building, and we think there's an opportunity of having a mural in the auditorium, or in the hallways or something. It might be appropriate, and if you'd be interested and if they were, why we'd develop it from there. As fast as we could get these institutions committed to the sponsorship, then we could assign artists to make tentative sketches for the job. It was a problem really of, as I said -- we had to have men at work in order to use the money that had been designated for the area and for the activity. If you didn't have it, of course, the funds would probably be withdrawn. It was an impossible sort of task, but one that you thought you had to do something about. I think that in most cases it wasn't too difficult to secure sponsorship of high schools and libraries. I mean it took some considerable amount of talking perhaps and so on, but once they realized that this was something that was within their own discretionary powers, and that the work would be subject to their complete approval, they didn't feel too great a hesitancy about ordering, or becoming sponsors. I think the greatest threat to their acceptance would have been that work could have been put in there over their own decision of what they wanted. This couldn't be. By the way, this was a tremendous source of newspaper comment. You know the headlines in papers like the Journal-American and other papers, particularly the Journal-American, was anti-New Deal and so on, but you know these murals were being rammed down the public's throat and a communist mural had been torn down off the wall because it had these Red symbols in it and so on and so on. This was foisted down the taxpayer's throat and so on and so on. As a matter of fact, it didn't happen. It was silly because the thing that they charged was the Red Star of the Soviet Republic was the rear end of a Shell Gas truck that had a red star on it, you know the gas station has ...

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colin wilson the outsider


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The Fake Freeway Sign that Became a Real Public Service


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The Sign can only represent the Object and tell about it. It cannot furnish acquaintance with or recognition of that Object; for that is what is meant in this volume by the Object of a Sign; namely, that with which it presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it. No doubt there will be readers who will say they cannot comprehend this. They think a Sign need not relate to anything otherwise known, and can make neither head nor tail of the statement that every Sign must relate to such an Object. But if there be anything that conveys information and yet has absolutely no relation nor reference to anything with which the person to whom it conveys the information has, when he comprehends that information, the slightest acquaintance, direct or indirect -and a very strange sort of information that would be- the vehicle of that sort of information is not, in this volume, called a Sign.
- cs pierce
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on trade signs


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hardware store display items on ebay


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my local bank (boa). i noticed theyd laid off the armed guard a while back, guess i wasnt the only one who noticed. geesh!


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Anything still on your to-do list?

I always wanted to publish a list of the clients who don’t pay.

It’s a lousy practice. Do you think there’s more of it going on, and if so, why?

These men are sloshing around with millions and millions, and they are arrogant and they think they can get away with anything, and through the years they pretty much have.

What’s the definition of luxury for this crowd?

We’re still in a period of heavy consumption, because the appetite is still there, but now it’s sort of underground. Once they have the four houses and the jet — at least one — and they have the yacht and the art collection, then what do they do? I can’t say that this is the trend that it was shaping up to be before the recession, but the next thing I think is philanthropy. Because the rest is basically things, and things aren’t enough.



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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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