Boing Boing: Vatican astronomer denounces Creationism as “paganism”

Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it’s turning God into a nature god

Speak Up › Pity… How I wish for simpler times.An excercise in clever-clever iconographic simulacrity eclipsing humanity that leaves a different chill in your heart from the one it probably thinks it will.

Damn Interesting » Earth’s Artificial Ring: Project West FordIf they’d forbidden people to photograph it they’d basically have pre-empted anything Christo could ever do. 🙂

Imagine a horror film about an insane ventriloquist who believes that his possessed dummy is talking. What he believes the dummy to be saying is not what the dummy is saying. The dummy can appeal to the audience, but the ventriloquist will not understand the audience’s reactions. Especially when the dummy tells the audience that the ventriloquist thinks it wants him to murder his wife.

How can the ventriloquist silence the dummy? Even if he destroys it or exorcises it he will only silence its real voice. He will still hear what he thinks it is saying. And if his insanity is diagnosed and treated after this, he will still be unaware of what he has actually done.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics

Marie Antoinette on the Way to the Guillotine, by Jacques-Louis David 1793 Pen and ink, 150 x 100 mm Musée du Louvre, Paris

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Marie_Antoinette_by_David.jpg

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art

1

Marie Antoinette was not French by birth.

Marie Antoinette did not say “let them eat cake”, and that is a mistranslation anyway.

Marie Antoinette was executed during the French Revolution. She was the last queen of France.

2

Marie Antoinette had a dairy farm where she acted out the fantasy of being a milkmaid. She did not milk the cows, servants took care of that. They also made sure that the farm was kept spotlessly clean and that the animals were sweetly perfumed.

The spectacle of social virtue even in uneducated agricultural labourers is the genre content of the Pastoral. This bucolic sentimentality is a lullaby of social order even in those with least to gain from society, in this case the social order of a monarch who would later lose her head at the hands of the unwashed. Marie Antoinette’s milkmaid fantasy was Pastoral as consumed experience rather than as viewed image or read text.

The experiences and relations of agricultural labourers stripped of necessity or untidiness and then aestheticised are – what exactly? Remove the power and satisfaction of the monarch from the equation and you have inept wannabe agricultural labourers who don’t actually wannabe agricultural labourers. This must have filled a few spare afternoons but it told those who took part in it very little about country life, and nothing that they didn’t want to hear.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, relational art

NEWSgrist – where spin is art: The “November” Matrix: Art, Theory, Criticism, Palaver

Is the influential October magazine, the flagship journal of art theory, a spent force?

Art & Language certainly thought so in the 1970s. I have that issue of Art-Language now. It’s very funny.

Imagine a horror film about an insane ventriloquist who believes that his possessed dummy is not in fact talking, and that he must speak for it.

The trained seal of approval that is Relational Aesthetics (The Institutional Theory + Suspension Of Judgement – Radical Commitment) is unlikely to get its coat based on the chinstroking of Octoberistas. Pointing out that there is someone behind the curtain doesn’t help. That someone still has social relations.

Despite Bourriaud’s protestatations, RA is deeply, achingly, embarrasingly managerial. It is the managerial mode of regard embodied in materials that managers recognise: assets, particularly human assets.

And RA is auratic. Because without the aura of management -uh- art, what differentiates the social and aesthetic incompetence of RA from just actual social and aesthetic incompetence?

Both these qualities can only increase if people need their passports or whatever as part of the beautific images of managerialism that RA give us as works. Managers’ egos will not be deflated by an “art” of ever stronger management of Real People in ever more tighly controlled additions (or revelations) of managerial value (or power) in social situations.

Bishop‘s assessment of British art criticism in the 1990s is depressingly accurate but there is an account of art from that time that gives us something to work with. Julian Stallabrass’s concept of the Urban Pastoral (from “High Art Lite”) is far too close to the bone of RA to leave unused.

Complicit art is radicalism to radicalism (two lefts make a right). It is a way of shocking the bourgeoisie when the chattering classes are all as radical as fuck. The complicity of shocking the complicit bourgeoisie with radicalism (modernism) simply swapped for the complicity of shocking the radical bourgeoisie with complicity (relational aesthetics). This is as naive a negativity as that alleged for modernism. Nothing to see here, move along.

But be careful what you wish for. The managerial aura of Relational Aesthetics, like the still life of fruit on a merchant’s wall, is a presentation of what is absent. And what is absent in the age of Complicit Art is a unified masses that is an unreflective market for the mass media that CA desperately aurates. In real life it is winter, the fruit is gone. The flesh has withered on the face that remains youthful in the portrait. There is a riot on the other side of the wall on which the gridded canvas hangs. We all have weblogs.

Complicit Art is the Venetian landscape for those unwilling or unable to take the grand tour, the pr0n site for the Slashdotter. This is not a reassuring lullaby, a harmless deathbead lie, this is a snuff movie. You don’t have to do criticism to be critique. There is something wrong about a world with Paris Hilton in it.

What would be unforgivable would be to abandon reflexive awareness, to fail to animate the world of references created in the work (is this managerial?). Sometimes careerist opportunism is just careerist opportunism. But sometimes it is Jeff Koons.

Ro-co-co.