Long Portrait: Noah Kalina
February 2009
By Clayton Cubitt
“So pretension is a form of pretending, and pretending can be productive. I wouldn’t be the first to argue that the arts might provide a useful safe-zone for working things out. Brian Eno certainly beats me to the punch in his diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices (1996), when he writes: ‘I decided to turn the word “pretentious” into a compliment. The common assumption is that there are “real” people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.”
Frieze Magazine | Archive | Class Act by Dan Fox
(via jomc)
Starkwhite presents Peter Stichbury at Art Los Angeles Contemporary
January 28-31, 2010, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood
'Estelle 3' 2009, acrylic on linen
Larry Walnut
Colored pencil
(thanks Larry)
Candice, Charlie & Edgar
Winston Churchill Painting
1945
(Photograph by Hans Wild)
Caption: “Former PM Winston Churchill smoking a cigar as he stands in his studio dressed in his blue RAF siren jump suit while touching up one of his landscape paintings at his country estate Chartwell in Kent.”
(via Life)
"…Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.”
From a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949; from Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper & Row, 1969.
(via here)
Liz Filardi’s presentation “Social Networking as Storytelling” - Code, Create, Communicate: Bringing Out a Community at the Parsons Design and Technology Thesis Symposium, 2009.
Helena
Colored pencil
2009
(thanks H & E)
Facebook is preparing us for a future of social behavior from which carnality has been evicted, taking with it all the instinctual crises, the earthly terrors and joys we have come to know. In the Facebook future, socializing will no longer be the cogent, purpose-driven, and hierarchical activity that has ordered our ways of living and the construction of our cities. What will be left to us will be the stewardship of its residues—the comparison of likes and dislikes, the rituals of gift-giving, the exchange of perfunctories, and above all the keeping of lists of names of friends and acquaintances, their quantities. And Facebook, in its genius, has seen that all of this can be done in aggregate, consecutively, and in remote solitude.
Christopher Hsu
(via papermonument)
“We are pretty much the same as we were twenty thousand years ago. We have in the course of these twenty thousand years actualized an immense number of things which at that time and for many, many centuries thereafter were wholly potential and latent in man.”
Aldous Huxley
The many other potentialities remain hidden in us. Let’s develop the methods and the means to actualize them!
via Tinkering till the end of time
(via zachklein)
Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.
(Via TED)
Michael Wesch
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University
2009
(thanks MW)
Estelle
2009
Acrylic on linen
(thanks EJF)
Man pretending to be Jim Barr
2009
Pencil
(thanks JB)