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Sometimes, in a free society, we may read things that we not only don't agree with but that we find personally offensive. For me, Charlie Gere's "Non-Relational Aesthetics" is that book. It is the most godawful piece of shit ostensiby about art that it has ever been my misfortune to read. But rather then firebombing the publisher, as Gere defended other aggrieved critics doing recently, I'll commend Artwords Press for seeking out new voices and encouraging readers to engage with ideas that they might not otherwise encounter.If anyone wants a copy let me know in the comments and I'll send you mine, post free.

[a rant, via netbehaviour]Art *is* the specialised language [for art].Being smart at medicine is no good when a car won't start. But beinggood at quoting Theory is good no matter what, apparently, much like thetransferable skills of management. The idea that Theory is the properdomain language of art is one that needs "problematising". Or spanking.I'd refer to my favourite theorists Art & Language to make two points.The first is that art is only a defensible activity if it does thingsthat cannot be done any other way. Reducing art to a mash-up offashionable cod-philosopho-political jargon doesn't do this, and *art*students are within their rights to reject the verbal fetishes of thiscult in favour of actually making art. And/or theories.The second is that given the current march of a corporate informationculture grinding the world down to manageable, sellable binary digits(cf Alan Liu), the aesthetic is not the conservative fetish of theilliterate - it is a vital means of resistance. One that the semioticmanagers of Theory are helping to neutralise.

[from Private Eye]£85bn Tax contribution from financial sector, supposedly crucial to the UK economy, from 1997 to 2007£250bn Officially predicted increase in government debt, to be repaid from everybody else's taxes, following banking-induced recesion

As Canada points and laughs, another bit of England succumbs to a few centimetres of snow. The bit I'm in, as it happens. Brrr.

If God exists and He is the cause of truth, beauty and goodness then His death would remove those qualities from human experience.

If God does not exist then truth, beauty and goodness cannot be caused by him and so their existence in the human experience cannot be dependent on His existence.

These are crayon sketches of two possible positions regarding the relationship of virtue to the existence of God.

In a post on the painter Francis Bacon at OpenDemocracy the author confuses these two positions. Specifically they confuse the preconditions of the former with the consequences of the latter.

They find the exemplification of this mummers' atheism in the painting of Francis Bacon. Bacon cannot be touched by the grace of God for a very good reason that they neglect to mention for some reason. Despite this, Bacon treats both sacred and profane subjects equally in his art. This is an a-theistic art (rather than an anti-theistic art) but it is not a design for life for atheists or the only possible experience of a Godless universe, even for Bacon.

Marie Antoinette

Somebody has to be holding the parcel when the music stops. Their coronation can be useful for closing any messy chapters in the (art) history books. A career awaits, the messy and unprofessional lived experience of actually doing something needs tidying up for professional presentation.

Charlie McCarthy

The gentrification of the social graph's captured aesthetics. The managerialist pastoral of relationism applied to reclaiming the messy emergence and sociality of Web 2.0. The Foxy-Whiskered Gentleman playing at being Jemima Puddleduck.

Nelson Muntz

Pointing and laughing at YouTube videos is one thing. Pointing and laughing at the history of art computing is the same thing. This is what semiotics does in as much as it does anything. It contributes to the cultural heat death of corporate information culture. 

As capitalism does another ideological reset the excuse du jour is that the credit crunch was a highly improbable event, a "black swan" (it's not just a bad song by Thom Yhork).

If this is true then the people who sold unsustainable mortgages to get the commission on them then sold them on rather than take on the risk of those mortgages were behaving irrationally, because they could not have foreseen that anyone would default on them. This would raise more questions than it answers.

The problem isn't probability. The sub-prime market was exploited in the way it was because of its probabilities, not despite them. The problem is greed. And self-pitying denial won't disguise that, however dense the notation.

"Surgical Strike" was a 1996 art computing project concerned with the social history of art computing. "Surgical Strike Free Software" is a 2008 reimplementation of the original project.Computing has trickled down from military applications through corporations to universities and finally into art practice. This history is present in the language and social assumptions of computing. This culture sits uncomfortably with the culture of art, or at least it should. Surgical Strike depicts these contradictions in the form of ironized computer art in order to make them explicit.The source materials for Surgical Strike were military jargon, the art of William Latham (due to its status as paradigmatic "computer art" at the time), 3D models of stealth aeroplanes, 1990s computer software logos, and verbal descriptions of awkward facts from the history of commercial computing. The swirly structures of stealth bombers replaced the innocent spheres and cylinders of Latham's computational Darwinism with more significant forms. The texturing of these forms with commercial trademarks rather than procedural textures was another level of indexicality. These were then sandwiched between texts describing things the computer industry would rather forget in the background and the source code for the depicted form asserting its primacy and interfering with the unreflective consumption of the image in the foreground.The composition of the images produced with the original system was probably based, unconsciously, on Art & Language's "Hostages" series. The idea of an indexical computer programming language came, again unconsciously, from PJH Halls at KIAD. The project came to me fully formed as I walked to the CEA at Middlesex University early on the morning that I desperately needed to have a project to start.Surgical Strike proper is a toy programming language for creating patterns of textured 3D objects. The keywords of the language are intended to sound militaristic. Although Surgical Strike can use any 3D models or textures, it is intended to use models of military artefacts and images of software logos. The language features iteration but not branching or even variables so it is not Turing complete.The original version of Surgical Strike was written in C++ using Apple's QuickDraw 3D for Power Macintosh on Mac OS 7.x . The parser was hand-written and compiled programs were executed using a bytecode format inspired by the public documentation of Display PostScript. Given the unmaintainability of this code and possible rights issues the current version has been written from scratch.Surgical Strike is not anti-militaristic except to the extent that it works with the assumptions of the cultures it is targeted at. Those cultures were idealistic mid-1990s art computing and mid-1990s art criticism ignorant of the content of art computing. The title is a piece of military jargon that served to illustrate the gap between depiction and reality. But the gap that it indicated was in the target cultures, not (neccessarily) between the ideals and reality of militarism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/arts/design/04pica.htmlDavid Galenson seems to be part of the wave of culturally triumphant economic explainers who are dining out on neoliberalism's success since that nasty business with Keynesianism in the 70s meant the economic paradigm had to be reset. They definitely have it right this time, it's a science. You know, like Marxism was.Galenson's mission is to bring the explanatory pixie-dust of market economic analysis to art. The NY Times article linked above contains a number of extraordinary claims about art inspired by Galenson's latest book. Not all are made by Galenson, but they do not contradict the quotes from him. I am hoping that Galenson's book has been misrepresented by the article, but the article itself requires addressing.Galenson apparently claims that markets and conceptual innovation are what differentiates Twentieth Century art from previous art. But markets in art have existed since classical times. Particularly wherever a merchant class has emerged but also with nobles and royalty. Courts are, in economic terms, markets. And the competition of different dynasties, courts or worthies for the scarce resources of artistic production constituted a monopoly only in so much as everyone who buys a can of coke does.Michael Rushton goes further than Galenson by claiming that innovation requires markets. If there was no innovation in art prior to the existence of markets then the historical emergence of cave art is inexplicable, and tribal art must be an haullucination.Galenson seems to claim that quantitative methods or market economics have not often been applied to art and that art history is hostile to them. This is ahistorical. There is a long history of Marxist analyses of art history, and the history of aesthetics is largely a history of economic class and economic development. The question of who pays for art, and how the sale price of a work of art relates to its aesthetic worth, is not a new one.Galenson follows these claims with a quick count of image frequency in recent art history textbooks in order to establish the most important works of the twentieth century. But text books are not the same as the museums, journals, catalogues or collections that create the importance of works of art that these books report. Applying simple quantitative methods to this tertiary information renders them both information destroying and parasitic. At best they can prove only that someone else has proved something somewhere else.Books were chosen because actual great art does not come to market often enough to provide useful data for quantitative analysis of what the market determines great art to be. Read that sentence again. It is fortunate indeed that Galenson didn't have to rely on the art market to provide the information he needs to prove that markets are the producers of great works. But is there not a problem with a thesis when attempting to follow it through disproves it on a practical level?Economics can tell us much about the sociology and history of art, as it always has. Galenson is wrong if he thinks that he is bringing new cargo to the art world. And his premises and methodology are bogus.That said, let us suppose for a moment that Galenson is right. What would Galensonist art look like?Since it cannot be measured by sales, it need not be expensive. No Damien Hirst skull bonds for hedge fund managers and oil oligarchs to use to out-pace the market for lesser commodities, you could sell an unmade bed as long as you get in the next art textbook. Since the interior structure of the work is irrelevant, it need not be aesthetic. Easy reproducability is more valuable than beauty or internal complexity. Since it must get in the textbooks it needs to be popular, but this need not be because of its artistic worth. It could illustrate fashionable theory or trends, and/or be produced by an artist who is good at parties.Galenson's artist is Tracy Emin. He is welcome to her.The post-historical Hegelian idealism of market economics is anti-humanistic. But art is part of the human condition. It is no surprise that the figures an economist is interested in are numeric rather than compositional. The problem is that art considered quantitatively has no interior, yet it is the content of art that makes it "great".The failure of Galenson's project is the failure of neoliberalism laid bare without the concealing effects of economic transition or state intervention. Markets cannot provide Galenson with the material he needs to fulfill his project. It's a good thing we don't have to rely on them for anything more important. Such as, say, food or energy...

Duchamp's readymades are acts of ontological transubstantiation, they nominate non-artistic objects as artworks. This is aesthetic blasphemy.Nominating a non-art object as an artwork requires that the object not be an art object. But imagine that you have a time machine. Now you can go back in time to ancient Rome or Greece with any non-art object the artist seeks to nominate as an artwork and have it accepted as a work of art. Not declared, displayed and accepted.Assuming you avoid paradoxes, the object will not have been nominated as an art object and will never have been a non-art object. Is this just nomination at an extra level of indirection, or does it undo the readymade?(From a conversation with Evie.)