And man, it’s a wacky ride.

notational:

gallerygirl:

In honor of the intern curated emerging artist show at Studio Gallery, Carte Blanche, I have sifted through one very out of date text for some pieces of advice still relevant more than 20 years later. Having dealt with a whole variety of emerging artists, from the the student to the second careerist, and all the problems they bring to the table, I believe the following quotes offer a little guidance to the misguided and direction to the aimless. Take what you like and leave the rest:

James Rosenquist, artist

“The reason I work, the reason I make things, is to illuminate physically some feelings I’ve had. Then they exist outside of myself in some kind of form, so when I am old and gray I’ll be able to look at them and realize that I was alive at a certain period. I really regard it almost like a philatelic thing. When I’m dead, that’s outside the human condition and I don’t care any more about the works.”

Bruce Beasely, sculptor

“The artists I have known who have had rewarding and successful careers are those who have been able to make very clear choices about their priorities and expectations. Once these priorities were selected, they wasted no emotion on the other things they gave up.”

Henry Geldzahler, curator

“How good is my art (not my career), how original, to what extent is it consonant with my intention, what is my ambition for it, and does it have (this must be asked as diligently of abstraction) redeeming social value, does society have any need of it or use for it? These are the questions that hurt.”

Julian Schnabel, artist

“In New York, my plan was to eat pizza and paint pictures.”

Tennyson Schad, gallery owner

“If you want to exhibit and sell your work, you must work at your craft, develop a coherent body of work, and take whatever steps are necessary for that work to be exhibited as often as possible, in museums, universities, cooperative galleries, wherever. This is no substitute for exposure.”

Tibor de Nagy, gallery owner

“Art is a personal expression no matter how much or how little it covers the universe. Whatever it encompasses, it has to be a sincere vision. the technical skill with which it is created is essential for its success. I see, in every artist, a priest of his own religion who wants to deliver is his sermon in order to collect his believers The places where he exposes his beliefs are art institutions and galleries. There are many priests but hardly any saints within a given epoch.”

Ivan Karp, dealer

“When it comes to confronting the owners or directors of galleries for the first time, you must be in possession of the ability to survive repeated, and no always tender, rejection; in other words, you must have emotional resiliency and some perfectly intelligible evidence of what your work is about.”

Jeffrey Deitch, art adviser

“Connoisseurship is developed by seeing as much art as possible, good and bad. In fact, it is only after studying bad works by an artists that one really begins to understand what makes their best works great.”

Ones I like in bold.

Toot toot.

Good morning, Massachusetts.  I opened the Netflix website this morning to have them tell me that I might enjoy, “New York, I Love You.”  Since I’ve decided I won’t be going home for the month of February (and March probs), I’m going to watch this movie instead of going to work on this grey as fuck Saturday morning.

pie0:

This is so adorable.

(via kottke)

collisiondetection.net reviews the article here: “Molecular secretes of the ‘iron plated snail’”

the original pnas pdf is here: “Protection Mechanisms of the iron-plated armor of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent gastropod”

my fave part of the paper is where they basically say, “evolution figured out a bunch of shit that can be useful for us,” but they put it more scholarly:

The design space for synthetic multilayered structural composites for protective applications is enormous, with a large number of potential design parameters… Hence, predicting the response of such systems is extremely complicated and requires accurate information… Much of this information is typically unknown… Biological systems, such as the one described here, greatly reduce the engineering design space since efficient threat-protection design concepts have emerged through the lengthy evolutionary process that fulfill the necessary functions and constraints.

Anyway, this is cool.

(via vobios)

sharkclaws:

I was born on this island; not many of my people can say that. Most of them were recruited and brought here, and as much as they love this place, as much as they would do anything to defend it, they need to know that they can leave if they want to.
—Benjamin Linus


Lost premiered on ABC on September 22, 2004, and almost immediately it became a television phenomenon.  It had a great hook (People survive a plane crash and are stranded), a large cast of interesting characters, and a polar bear on a tropical island.  The story from there took dozens of twists and turns.  The Island apparently was able to heal the sick, and it had a hatch where numbers had to be pressed every 108 minutes, which was constructed by a group called the Dharma Initiative, only it was now controlled by a group called The Others, who had the capacity to actually move the island, which made the survivors travel through time.

If this sounds confusing to anyone who doesn’t watch Lost, it may be even more confusing to people who do watch Lost.  The show has more unanswered questions than a high school dropout’s SAT test.  There’s a lot of talk about what questions need to be answered as the final season begins, and many are demanding no less than every single mystery solved and everything to make sense after the final 17-18 episodes have aired.  These people will be disappointed, because that’s not what the show is about, and that’s not the story the writers are trying to tell. 

Lost is ultimately a show about free will vs. pre-determined destiny.  Faith vs. Science.  The theme of the show is told through the characters, where they’re going and how they’re going to get there.  The plot is advanced through the different mysteries about the island.  The numbers, the smoke monster, Jacob, and even the Island are just red herrings.  The answers surrounding those mysteries may or may not be revealed, and if they are, they will be done in ways to service the story which is used to service the overall theme of the show.  The ultimate question about the final season of Lost is: Are the characters in the situations they are in because they chose to be there, or were they meant to be there at the same time?  That’s the only question that needs to be tackled in full during the final episodes of Lost.

Others will disagree with me.  And that might be the greatest achievement for the creators and everyone who worked on Lost.  It’s a show that’s many different things to different people.  Some love it for the different character stories.  Some love it for the mysteries.  Some love the increasingly preposterous Jack-Kate-Sawyer-Juliet love rectangle (Jack wants to blow up the Island so he can have another chance at Kate?  Really?). 

There’s something for everyone.  As long as they can deal with confusion.

WOST.