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“convergence”an unlikely, striking pair of images, along with a paragraph or three exploring the deeper resonances”
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“Currently indexing 467 projects”
Month: June 2007
links for 2007-06-01
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Map not to indicate non-nuclear-capable nations
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“The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released the fourth and “last call” draft for version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world’s most widely used free software license. “
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“Korea has just finished negotiating a free trade agreement with the US that is a complete disaster on copyright. Korea has agreed to give up all fair use to copyrighted works”
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“the latest wave of British werewolf sightings”
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“In this paper I examine and refute the new conceivability arguments due to Frank Jackson and David Chalmers.”
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“One of the most influential thinkers of ontology at the beginning of our century was the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, Ritter von Handschuchsheim. His best known conception deals, among other things, with objects that do not exist.”
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“Meinong posits that “existence” is merely a property of an object, just as color or mass might be a property. Thus, according to Meinong, a figure such as Sherlock Holmes would lack the property of existence, just as Sherlock Holmes lacks the property of
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Nice sauce-for-the-gander refutation of Philosophical Zombies.
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“Here are the diagrams used by Jacques Lacan in Les Écrits.”
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“The Lacan phenomenon is a bizarre one. “
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“Students were spellbound, owing to the standard ingredients of cult status”ideas and charisma…”
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“one of the weirdest things to cross my path was the British werewolf”
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More UK werewolf cases
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“a collection of image mosaics that visually compare peculiar mundane objects in urban space”
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A show of Chris Ashley’s excellent art.
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“More than 180,000 copies were downloaded from Jeremy’s mirror (which is one of five!), yet the book has still been quite successful, selling almost 19,000 copies in a year and a half.”
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“Here’s a PDF of a “graffiti report card” that you can fill out and place next to graffiti in your neighborhood. “
Burberry Bathos
“No Secret Painting V”, 2006, is a work by Art & Language (A&L) consisting of a large square dark abstract canvas accompanied by a smaller framed text that seems to refer to it.
The accompaniment of a dark abstract square by a text is a scheme that Art & Language used in their “Secret Paintings” and “Guaranteed Paintings” of the 1960s. These referred to Malevich and to Stella, and to certificates of authenticity for conceptual artworks. But unlike the secret paintings the composition of the squares (and lines) within the canvas are perceptible.
The plaid pattern is from A&L’s earlier piece “Wrongs Healed In Official Hope”, an installation of canvases and of filing cabinets made from canvases as a parody or travesty of A&L’s earlier text-based Indices of the 1970s. The text it contained was not a piece of art criticism, politics, or set theory, but an extreme pornographic sado-masochistic fantasy set at a girl’s boarding school rendered increasingly abstract by textual transformation and substitution.
Eventually the text in “Wrongs Healed In Official Hope” became an abstract pattern of squares and lines, a decorative plaid pattern. This decorativeness appears to have no content, only decorative effect, but it is haunted by typographic grids and these lead back to a textual expression of degenerate taste. The implication seemed to be that the plaid was no less a product of that taste. There are no comfortable chairs in the work of A&L.
Accompanying texts that seem to describe or specify some aspect of the image that they are counterposed with were also a feature of A&L’s “Flags For Organizations” and “Gustave Courbet’s Burial At Ornans Expressing…”. It is this last piece that the text in “No Secret Painting” seems to serve a similar function to. It specifies or describes the four sections of the canvas as having certain content. But unlike “Burial At Ornans…” there is an aesthetic and genetic connection between the text and the image. Some of the text of “Wrongs Healed In Official Hope” is incorporated, and the composition of the plaid is mentioned.
In both the visibility of the painting’s pictorial content and in the fact that the text does actually shed some light on that content this is not a secret painting. A secret is neither set up nor revealed. Where the secret paintings pointed an accusing finger, deflating the mysteries of other works and of the viewer’s regard, “No Secret Painting” is self-deflating.
But this is not A&L For Dummies. The painting and the text both refer not just to each other but to “Wrongs Healed…”, and to more than “Wrongs Healed”. This is an index, and the viewer has work to do. As with the apparently blank surfaces of “Index: Now They Are”, these are allegories of an artistic paradigm. I just haven’t quite worked out exactly which one just yet…
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique
links for 2007-05-31
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“But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. “
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“how the Internet is exposing and undermining the arbitrary categories we use for knowledge, social organization, and employment.”
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“Third, we need to modernise our intellectual property framework, and in places it may need to be strengthened.”
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“Tim goes on to suggest a simple and cunning mechanism for minimizing copyright’s impact on authorship, a method that will allow the largest variety in art and expression. This is great stuff”
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“Freedom Defined” is now at version 1.0. Good stuff.
Everything Is Miscellaneous?
The idea of a monadic taxonomy of knowledge raises the spectre of structurelessness with its hidden power structures. But it also opens the possibility of shaking up taxonomies and even ontology, which is good as long as it doesn’t result in mere eclecticism.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, philosophy