Out to Dinner with Rolf – Danica Phelps 2002.

I like Danica Phelps’s work. There’s a number of reasons why.

She is combining intimate drawings of her life with simple data visualisation of intimate financial details of her life. The former was taboo under the universalising abstraction of modernism, the latter is taboo under the money laundering marketeering of contemporary.

She prices her drawings based on how good she thinks they are. The introduction of quality, taste, or difference into consideration of work is disruptive for contemporary.

She copies her drawings before selling them. You know the generation of the work you are buying, and your purchase of it becomes part of the financial record abstraction in the work. This reduces the scarcity of the work and introduces the sale and reproduction of it into the work itself.

And she had a show where she bought work from other artists, displaying and selling it alongside (as part of?) her work. This makes curation, reference and dialogue, and again taste all part of the work. Given the premium placed on reputation and the divisiveness of competing for opportunities it is also un-markety sociability and a Gift to other artists.

This is all a different universe from much contemporary art, one that acknowledges a world outside the gallery door and how that world corrupts (or at least intrudes on) the aesthetic plane. The work looks good too, all contour drawing and coloured stripes.

Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts features | Thoroughly modern ManetIf you told me it was a contemporary work not only would I believe you, I’d be excited to see an image that’s so true to our time.Nineteenth-century art has such an invincible hold on us because we are still in confused rebellion against a social order that seems more permanent now than it did in the age of Manet and Marx. The real ghosts in Manet’s Paris are ourselves.

“Zero influence!” » Blog Archive » Brand Vs. Brand

I am being paid a million dollars to shill for the above link. OK, that’s not true, but I have been asked to mention it. Brand Vs. Brand is a kind of BrandFight. If brands are sexy, then two brands fighting it out in a Web 2.0 interface must be even sexier. Go take a look.

Oil is substitute labour. Hydrocarbon slavery (without exploitation) or surplus. Stakhanov in a tank. Or possibly his tears. Stakhanov’s piss?

Technorati Tags: philosophy

Philosophy is a product of leisure. Leisure implies a surplus, the more leisure the more surplus. A large surplus is difficult for an individual to produce. Which may imply exploitation. What is the ethical and class character of leisure and how does this impact philosophy? Does it require a Victorian ethos of different-kinds-of-labour (see the painting) to make it a product of (or producer of) work rather than leisure?

Technorati Tags: philosophy

Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog » Blog Archive » Zoomorphic CalligraphyOur friend Peacay over at BibliOdyssey has posted a number of fascinating pieces of Islamic art in the form of zoomorphic calligraphy. This piece, like several others on his site, is by a Sudanese artist named Hassan Musa (see also).This (but more the art of Dr. Ahmed Moustafa) is the sort of thing that led to Psychetecture.

Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog » Blog Archive » Foster's BlogWowwowwow! A production blog for the amazing retro-styled, Flash-produced, Cartoon Network cartoon “Foster’s Home For Imaginary friends”.Secret door!!!!!!?????

The romantic’s favorite mathematician.

Does Gödel Matter? The romantic’s favorite mathematician didn’t prove what you think he did.

Conceptualism was a kind of aesthetic platonism. But Duchamp’s philosophical equivalent was Wittgenstein, not Godel: anti-art goes with anti-philosophy.

Boing Boing: Sculpture’s wooden mount on display instead of sculpture

This is like the reverse of the “cleaner puts conceptual work in the bin” antipattern.