NEWSgrist: 2005 Openers

NEWSgrist - where spin is art

An e-zine covering the arts since 2000
///////////////////////////////////////
Vol.6, no.1
///////////////////////////////////////
http://newsgrist.typepad.com
Archives:
http://newsgrist.net
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Friday, January 07, 2005

NYC Subway Photo Ban Revived


{image source}

Here's the latest from various sources on the NYC subway photo ban:

via the NYTimes:
Graffiti-covered trains fill a Brooklyn subway yard, looking like row upon
row of comic strips. A weary passenger closes his eyes, his hands folded
as if in prayer. A young couple embraces in a subway car in front of an
advertisement that reads, "Don't Give Your Heart to Just Anyone."

Photographs of these separate moments have been exhibited or published
over the past year as part of a swelling of interest in the New York City
transit system, which celebrated its centennial in October. But the books
and exhibitions also coincide with a proposal by transit officials to ban
photography, as well as film and video recording, on subways and buses
without authorization.

The ban, which is intended to combat terrorism, will take effect as soon
as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's board approves it.

Much of the attention on the ban has been focused on tourists who take
innocuous snapshots. But its most profound effects may be on the artists
and documentary makers chronicling life as it moves through the subway
system, even though officials say these artists could get permits to
continue their work. […]

some background:
via Gothamist:
Photobloggers hit Grand Central Terminal for another protest against the
MTA's proposed ban on photography in subways. For more information on the
ban, read our previous post on the matter. And if you want to let the MTA
know how you feel, go here.

Kill the Bird has great black-and-white shots of the protest. And
Gothamist on the last protest.

more:
Photo District News: Industry Blasts MTA Over New York Subway Photo Ban

NYPIRG'S Straphanger Campaign: ACTION ALERT! MTA Wants to Ban Photos!

nycsubway.org: Without Photos?

National Press Photographers Assoc: MTA Still Wants To Ban NYC Subway
Photos

NYTimes cont'd:

Bob Shamis, curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of
New York, said the subways had enchanted photographers since Walker Evans
captured images of unsuspecting riders during the Depression. "It's a
world within a world," Mr. Shamis said. "It's just a place where you see
humanity exposed, in a way that doesn't often present itself. It's a
special situation within New York, a leveling out of people, socially, on
the subway. It's almost a playground for photographers."

Evanssubway
{image source}

Mr. Shamis said subways have been especially appealing to photographers
seeking insights into human character. "People let their guard down, in
terms of how they are seen on the subway, their demeanor and their
stance," he said.

Most scholars agree that Evans, who died in 1975, was the first to use the
subway as a lens on society. From 1938 to 1941, he took some 600
photographs of passengers, although the work was unknown to the public
until 1966, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of his
portraits.

Perhaps Evans would have accommodated himself to the proposed photography
ban. He took his portraits from a camera hidden in his coat. […]

Friday, January 07, 2005 at 12:22 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/image_source_he.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Ed Felton's Predictions For 2005

Copyleftcommie
{image source}

Professor Ed Felton has a blog: "Freedom to Tinker … is your freedom to
understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you
own."

Predictions for 2005

Here is my list of twelve predictions for 2005.

(1) DRM technology, especially on PCs, will be seen increasingly as a
security and privacy risk to end users.

(2) Vonage and other leading VoIP vendors will start to act like
incumbents, welcoming regulation of their industry sector.

(3) Internet Explorer will face increasing competitive pressure from
Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft's response will be hamstrung by its desire to
maintain the fiction that IE is an integral part of the operating system.

(4) As blogs continue to grow in prominence, we'll see consolidation in
the blog world, with major bloggers either teaming up with each other or
affiliating with major news outlets or web sites.

(5) A TV show or movie that is distributed only on the net will become a
cult hit.

(6) The Supreme Court's Grokster decision won't provide us with a broad,
clear rule for evaluating future innovations, so the ball will be back in
Congress's court.

(7) Copyright issues will be stalemated in Congress.

(8) There will be no real progress on the spam, spyware, and desktop
security problems.

(9) Congress will address the spyware problem by passing a harmless but
ineffectual law, which critics will deride as the "CAN-SPY Act."

(10) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement.
In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.

(11) New P2P systems will marry swarming distribution (as in BitTorrent)
with distributed indexing (as in Kazaa et al). Copyright owners will
resort to active technical measures to try to corrupt the systems'
indices.

(12) X-ray vision technology will become more widely available (though not
to the general public), spurring a privacy hoohah.

Friday, January 07, 2005 at 12:02 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/ed_feltons_pred.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

2005 Art Fairs + Biennials


{image: ADAA}

Artnet has posted a comprehensive list of all the 2005 art fairs; here's
January + February:

JANUARY
Art Miami
Palm Beach 3
San Francisco International Art Exposition
New York Ceramics Fair
The American Antiques Show
Photo L.A.
Winter Antiques Show
Art L.A.
Arte Fiera Bologna
Outsider Art Fair
Moscow Biennale

FEBRUARY
National Black Fine Art Show
Palm Beach! America's International Fine Art and Antique Fair
The AIPAD Photography Show 2005
ARCO
The Art Show

[…]

Friday, January 07, 2005 at 11:45 AM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/image_adaaheres.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Looking For Guernica

Guernica
{image source}

Interesting piece on political art by Dan Fox in Frieze: State of the Art

excerpt:
For all its spin, art is often reductive when addressing politics, lacking
the agency to move beyond illustration generalisations accepted in place
of analysis. A Noam Chomsky book, say, is displayed in a Thomas Hirschhorn
installation, yet despite its wealth of ideas I suspect that display is
all the installation does. And what does it mean to make a drawing of a
protest, as in the work of Sam Durant or Andrea Bowers? I fear that the
symbols of recusance arent going to effect much change as they progress
from studio to museum wall.

Surface references can preclude discussion since they suggest that deeper
meaning implicitly resides in the work. The engag artist can mistake
reproducing historical images of political activism for activism itself,
and, as a result, is in danger of being no better than a nostalgist,
performing cover versions of other peoples slogans. (As Morrissey sang, I
thought if you had an acoustic guitar, it meant you were a protest
singer.) There are, of course, exceptions. Hans Haacke twice the victim
of censorship by museums, and an artist whose practice is Brechtian in the
demands it places on its audiences strives to make work that renders the
links between big business and culture transparent. William Pope Ls
performances give disenfranchisement a visceral corporeality, regardless
of whether art audiences are watching or not. Jeremy Dellers topologies of
social history are made as much in the spirit of actively political
historians such as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams as they are as an
artist.

A friend recently observed that everyone is looking for the new Guernica.
In as much as people are hungry for, say, an iconic representation of
indignance at US foreign policy, or the massacre at Beslan, or debt in the
developing world she was right. However, political art can obviously only
function as part of the solution. Pablo Picassos righteous ire at the
bombing of Guernica resulted in one of the most famous and, dare I say,
dumbly literal pieces of protest art, yet his celebrity served to draw
attention to a war crime. It functioned in a propagandist sense, just as
the collages of John Heartfield (the Michael Moore of 1930s Germany)
denounced the corruption at Nazisms black core. Constantin Costa-Gavras
celluloid thriller Z (1969) turned the eyes of the world to the censorious
activities of Greeces dictatorship. Gillo Pontecorvos The Battle of
Algiers (1965) did the same for the French government over their
involvement in Algerian struggles for independence; its nuanced account of
the dilemmas of armed resistance recall George Orwells Spanish Civil War
memoir, Homage to Catalonia (1938). In a 1982 essay on Leon Golub, Peter
Schjeldahl observed that the artists canvases of the late 1960s expressing
outrage at the Vietnam War display a fatal flaw, namely the misfit of
general outrage and specific circumstance. It is the dilemma of wanting to
voice frustration, and denounce corruption and atrocity, while finding art
itself frustrating. War and power can be reduced in the form of static
image or object but at best its a reduction that, like an open palm
tightening to a clenched fist, gains force with bluntness, punching points
of entry where discussion can begin. […]

Tuesday, January 04, 2005 at 11:12 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/looking_for_gue.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Steven Parrino Dies at 46

Parrino
{image source}

Steven Parrino, 46, an Artist and Musician in a Punk Mode, Dies
By ROBERTA SMITH
Steven Parrino, an artist and musician who imbued abstract work in several
mediums with a relentless if oddly energetic punk nihilism, died early
Saturday morning in a traffic accident near his home in Greenpoint,
Brooklyn. He was 46.

Mr. Parrino was returning from a New Year's Eve party in Williamsburg when
he apparently lost control of his motorcycle and was thrown to the
pavement. According to a police report, he was pronounced dead at Bellevue
Hospital in Manhattan at 2:25 a.m. on Saturday.

Mr. Parrino was born in New York City in 1958 and grew up on Long Island.
He earned an associate of applied science degree from SUNY, Farmingdale,
in 1979 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from Parsons in 1982.

While in art school he began making the work for which he is best known:
big modernist monochrome paintings, mostly black ones, that had been
violently slashed, torn or twisted off their stretchers. He called these
sculptural, performance-oriented works "misshaped paintings" in response
to the shaped paintings that had preoccupied abstract painters in the
early 1960's.

Mr. Parrino first showed his paintings at Nature Morte, an East Village
gallery, in 1984, emerging as part of a strain of postmodernism called
Neo-Geo. Neo-Geo artists, who included Peter Halley, Wallace & Donahue,
Haim Steinbach, John Armleder and Olivier Mosset, mixed modernist
abstraction with a more cynical form of Pop Art worldliness by adding
references to commerce, design, music or the movies.

In addition to painting, Mr. Parrino exhibited painted environments that
involved monochrome walls pounded with sledgehammers; films of the making
of these environments; sleek metal sculptures whose bent and folded
elements related to his misshaped canvases; and photographs of his desktop
strewn with the newspaper stories, magazine spreads and music albums that
often inspired him. He also played electric guitar in several downtown
bands, most recently Electrophilia, a two-person group he formed with the
painter and keyboardist Jutta Koether.

He had nine solo shows in New York, the last four at the Team Gallery in
Chelsea and showed widely in galleries and museum in Europe, where his
work was more widely appreciated than in the United States. A
retrospective of his work will open at the Muse d'Art Moderne et
Contemporain in Geneva in 2006. But his influence was visible in New York
in the early 90's work of Cady Noland and more recently the black-hued,
rock 'n' roll-centered sculptural installations of Banks Violette.

Mr. Parrino is survived by his father, Jerry, of Hicksville, N.Y., and his
brother, Robert, of Manorville, N.Y.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005 at 10:01 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/steven_parrino_.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Monday, January 03, 2005
Lev Manovich's Mission To Earth


"What kind of cinema is appropriate for the age of Palm Pilot and Google?
Automatic surveillance and self-guided missiles? Consumer profiling and
CNN? …"

Well…

Chelsea Art Museum Project Room presents:
Lev Manovich
MISSION TO EARTH (Soft Cinema edition)
A media installation

Official Release Presentation of a new DVD published and distributed by
MIT Press (2005)

Saturday, January 8, 2:00 PM Opening reception and Talk

The discussion will continue as Manovich is joined by
Christiane Paul, adjunct new media curator, Whitney Museum of American Art
Barbara London, video and digital media curator, Museum of Modern Art
Marty St. James, visual artist
Sue Hubbard, art critic, Independent Newspaper, London
Lev Manovich, artist/author/new media theorist/professor
Ken Feinstein, artist/professor of experimental video

Moderated by Mechthild Schmidt, master teacher, digital communication and
media McGee, New York University

Mission to Earth is a film assembled by software in real time.

More information at www.softcinema.net
Complete text used for voiceover in Mission to Earth is available at
www.manovich.net/alpha.html

Monday, January 03, 2005 at 04:29 PM | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/lev_manovichs_m.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Three Dark Sides of Success…



Billy Jim, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, copywright by Stephen Flavin/
Artist Rights Society;

One of Dan Flavin's light works, or "propositions": "Red and Green
Alternatives (to Sonja)" (1964).

three from the NYTimes, on whining, chiming and climbing:

The Dark Side of Success
By GREG ALLEN
"Of course it wasn't just a light fixture."

[…] Flavin never intended his work, whatever its price or fame, to get
the "Antiques Roadshow" treatment. Flavin chose mass-produced,
off-the-shelf hardware precisely for its anonymously industrial aesthetic;
if the fixtures broke or were damaged, he would unsentimentally order
replacements. And he chose fluorescent lights because of their inherently
temporal nature. In a 1982 interview, he declared, "I believe in temporary
art wholeheartedly." To another interviewer, he said, "These 'monuments'
only survive as long as the light system is useful, 2,100 hours." Yet here
they were, being pored over and coddled, praised for their authentic
patinas, and lovingly restored, like rare old Baltimore silver.

Art made from obviously impermanent materials that is being painstakingly
preserved; art made to stay shiny and new that is being treasured for its
age; art challenging the notion of originality that is being scrutinized
for that quality; once-standard, off-the-shelf materials that are now hard
to find; collectors who cling to a piece of paper that proves their dated
light fixture is worthy of a museum, not a recycling bin; and caretakers
of a reputation who make decisions that they readily admit run counter to
the artist's original intentions. […]
……………………………………………….

DIRECTIONS | FROM THE WEB
The Art of the Fan
By CHOIRE SICHA
Fan Web sites, from Adam-Brody.com to Absolutely Zooey Deschanel
(fan-sites.org/zooey/), share certain traits: gushy tributes,
copyright-infringing use of paparazzi shots, a whiff of stalker
enthusiasm. A new site, cremasterfanatic.com, is unusual for the subject
it obsesses over - the Conceptual Art star Matthew Barney - but otherwise
it hews to the norm. It borrows pictures of Mr. Barney with his wife, the
pop singer Bjork. It summarizes each of his five "Cremaster" films. It
even posts tribute poetry:

Pearl filled baths
The pigeons flap
His cremaster relaxes

But Cremaster Fanatic is a fake. Or to put it more kindly, it's a parallel
work of art. "I'm pretending to be a fan," said its creator, the New York
artist Eric Doeringer, who wrote that haiku himself (as "David Kramer,"
one of many pseudonyms deployed on the site).

Mr. Doeringer, 30, an admissions counselor at the School of Visual Arts in
Manhattan, was reached by phone in Miami last week, where he was selling
homemade "bootlegs" - photos and drawings imitating other artists' work -
outside an art fair. Is he even a fan of the artists, like Elizabeth
Peyton, John Currin and Vik Muniz, that he mimics? "Some of them I like,
but the money's green any way you slice it," he said. Cremaster Fanatic,
which is studded with referral ads for Amazon and eBay, isn't making any
money - yet. "I don't know how well the business model will work out," Mr.
Doeringer said.

Is Cremaster Fanatic the first Warholian Web site? Mr. Doeringer said: "I
prefer to think of … what's his name? Uh … Andy Kaufman. With the best
of his work, all the wrestling stuff, you were never really sure if it was
made up or what was really happening." Mr. Doeringer is perhaps the first
artist to work in the medium of enthusiasm: "I'm getting the full fan
experience," he said.
……………………………………………….


Courtesy of D'Amelio Terras Gallery

DIRECTIONS | POSTSCRIPT
Invitation Only
By MIA FINEMAN
More than 100 artists were included in last year's Whitney Biennial;
countless others hoped to be invited but were left out in the cold. Some
worked through their disappointment on the therapist's couch; some groused
over drinks with friends. But the painter Delia Brown took a more active
approach: she parlayed her feelings of exclusion into a new work of art.

Last spring, Ms. Brown, 35, persuaded the three women who rejected her -
the Biennial's curators, Shamim M. Momin, Debra Singer and Chrissie Iles -
to pose for a group portrait. The painting, "Party," above, was recently
on view at D'Amelio Terras Gallery in Chelsea. "She didn't really tell us
too much about the project beforehand," Ms. Singer said. "But it was after
the Biennial, so it's not like we didn't know what was going on."

Ms. Brown took the three curators to a Park Avenue apartment owned by an
art collector, where she staged a party filled with faces familiar to art
world insiders; she then took photographs and based the painting on them.
The three curators stand before a painting by Dubuffet, glasses of white
wine in hand. Rendered slightly larger than life, they stare out at the
viewer with the same brutally appraising air as the teenage fashionistas
in "Mean Girls."

Lingering in the background are the people who own the apartment; the
unidentified collector who bought the painting last month for an
undisclosed amount (the works in Ms. Brown's show were priced from $20,000
to $60,000) is in the group on the right. And just behind the curators, as
a waitress carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres, is the artist herself.

For Ms. Brown, the painting was cathartic. "I've never been included in a
major museum show," she said, "and I was working through the feeling of
not being embraced, not being given the institutional stamp of approval."

Ms. Singer sees the situation differently. "There's a slight irony here,"
she said, "since from the point of view of many other artists, she's very
successful. For the opening of her show, one of the people in the painting
threw her the most amazing, in-crowd party - even more fabulous than the
party in the painting. But whatever level you're at, you always want more.
It's human nature."

Monday, January 03, 2005 at 03:51 PM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/dark_sides_of_s.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Regarding Clementine


{image source}


thanks to Eliot for posting this:

Regarding Clementine

Clementine Gallery announces the opening of a group exhibition curated by
Choire Sicha entitled Regarding Clementine which will feature new work by

* Nina Katchadourian
* Jennifer Dalton
* Eric Heist
* Jonathan Ames
* Patrick Bucklew
* Chuck Nanney
* Type A
* Cindy Workman
* Joy Garnett
* Eliot Shepard
* Courtney Tramposh
* Greg Allen
* Fort Necessity

Clementine Gallery is located at 526 West 26 Street, 2nd fl, New York.

Regarding Clementine will run from January 6 - February 5, 2005, and will
be on view during regular gallery hours, Tuesday - Saturday, 11 - 6 pm and
by appointment. A closing reception for the public will be held on Friday,
February 4, 6-8 pm.

Regarding Clementine will take a microcosm Clementine itself and exploit
it for a discussion of the discomforts and joys of the art industry, the
life of artists, the practices of curation and creation, and the
ugly-pretty evolution of West Chelsea itself. Art galleries are an
intensely private place of public use; they are stores, salons, and, at
their best, a home of idealism in a ruthless and sometimes cynical
marketplace. Each of the 12 artists or collectives in the show will create
new work for (or during) the exhibition. Their work has to do, ultimately,
with how art objects get made and priced and bought and viewed and curated
and reviewed and, of course, gossiped about. Performances will occur
irregularly, and work will be made in the gallery and during the course of
the show. A performance schedule will be available at the gallery as it
develops.

Nina Katchadourian, Jennifer Dalton, and Eric Heist are something like
systems analysts within the art world. For her project at Clementine,
Dalton will be digging deep in the financial lives of Clementines artists;
Katchadourian likes her jokes both linguistic and anthropomorphic. Shes
working up something musical and special that addresses quality of life
for artists. A novelist and comic performer, Jonathan Ames will be joined
in an irregular live performance as a work of art most probably on
Saturdays – by Patrick Bucklew, better known by the moniker The Mangina.
Chuck Nanney will work live in audio and light at Clementine, churning up
ideas of pop culture consumption – and quite possibly playing the
theremin. Type A the two-man collective of Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin–
perform masculine competitive and cooperative experiments and projects.
Theyll be working on a big new piece for the show which takes on the
predatory nature of collecting and art viewing. Cindy Workman utilizes
collage to sly effect. Shell be working part-time at Clementine,
soliciting pictures of gallery attendees. Joy Garnett will quote Ruscha to
debut a gorgeous series of new paintings, New Yorks Chelsea Art District
on Fire. Eliot Shepard will be lurking about documenting, then printing
photographs of, life in and around the gallery. Courtney Tramposh is a
young art student who makes quirky paper constructions and incredibly
skilled drawings. Greg Allen is a filmmaker, journalist, and collector;
this is his first appearance as an artist in a commercial gallery. Fort
Necessity an irregular and lovely poetry publication by Lily Mazzarella,
Cynthia Nelson, Maggie Nelson, and Jennie Portnof – will curate, with a
little audience help, the fifth edition of the journal at the exhibition.

Curator Choire Sicha works as the editorial director of Gawker Media. He
writes the weekly Arts & Leisure Guide for the New York Times, and his
writing regularly appears in that paper, the Los Angeles Times, the New
York Observer, and elsewhere.

Contact the gallery at 212-243-5937 or at [email protected]
for further information.

Monday, January 03, 2005 at 01:29 PM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/01/regarding_cleme.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Tsunami Aid: Blogs + Info



12/30/04 UPDATE: The death toll has shot up to 114,000.

For up-to-date news and volunteer info visit the The South-East Asia
Earthquake and Tsunami – SEA-EAT blog for short. News and information
about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts.

Also: visit Command Post for more info about aid organizations.

Phuket Tsunami has pictures and info about how to help.

{image: WorldChanging}

Tsunami videos via Sumankar's Yak Pad.

via TheWirelessWeblog:
Post-Tsunami Reconnect: Disaster Relief with Wireless; Posted Dec 29,
2004, 1:23 AM ET by Mike Outmesguine
I am working to organize a disaster relief effort to help those affected
by the Indian Ocean tsunami. Id like to send wireless equipment and
expertise to damaged areas to help reconnect the people. Im still working
out the details and will update you as more develops. […]

To DONATE {via Red – thanks Eliot}:
Earthquake disaster in Asia
donate to care.org, or any one of the other organizations accepting
donations, for the earthquake disaster in Asia. as of right now, the death
toll has exceeded 25,000.

28 Dec 2004 update: death toll passes 35,000

The International Committee of the Red Cross and government officials
here, as well as those in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, the
Maldives and as far away as Somalia, warned that with hundreds of
thousands of people stranded in the open without clean drinking water,
epidemics of cholera and other waterborne diseases could take as many
lives as the initial waves.
A Third of the Dead Are Said to Be Children [nytimes.com]

via NYTimes:
Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was
hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the
Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion
and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant
news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help.

There was the simple photo of a startlingly blue boat smashed against a
beachside palm in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, at www.thiswayplease.com/extra.html.
"Every house and fishing boat has been smashed, the entire length of the
east coast," wrote Fred Robart, who posted the photo. "People who know and
respect the sea well now talk of it in shock, dismay and fear."

At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and
commentary from Chennai, India: "Some drenched till their hips, some till
their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had
already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running
for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not
attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped and the
half alive were carried to safety."

His postings included a photo of a body on a sidewalk with a buffalo
walking by. "It now seems prophetic," he wrote, "for according to the
Hindu mythology, Lord Yama (the god of death) rides on a buffalo."

Bloggers at the scene are more deeply affected by events than the
journalists who roam from one disaster to another, said Xeni Jardin, one
of the four co-editors of the site BoingBoing.net, which pointed visitors
to many of the disaster blogs.

"They are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that
other media just can't," with an intimate voice and an unvarnished
perspective, with the richness of local context, Ms. Jardin said.

That makes blogs compelling - and now essential - reading, said Dr. Siva
Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New
York University and a blogger. Once he heard about the disaster, "Right
after BBC, I went to blogs," he said.

"This notion that we now have eyes and ears around the world is more than
something we've grown accustomed to; we've grown to demand it," he said.

Bloggers at worldchanging.com, some of them living in the affected
nations, began chattering immediately after the waves hit and began
discussions of ways to help. South Asian bloggers created
tsunamihelp.blogspot.com to direct people to aid organizations. "I haven't
seen this level of people saying, 'You know what? We can do something
here. We can connect the pieces,' " said Alex Steffen, who lives in
Seattle and edits worldchanging.com. "It's mind-blowing, and it's
inspiring."

Howard Rheingold, the author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution,"
about the use of interactive technologies like text-messaging to build ad
hoc coalitions, said that using blogs to muster support for aid was a
natural next step. "If you can smartmob a political demonstration, an
election or urban performance art, you can smartmob disaster relief," he
said.

One veteran of the online medium said he was initially "a little
disappointed" in the reports he got from the blogs. Paul Saffo, director
of the Institute for the Future in California, said that with the
widespread use of digital cameras and high-speed digital access, he was
expecting to see more raw video and analysis.

He said that upon reflection he realized that it was difficult to get
information out of hard-hit areas and that putting digital video online is
still the domain of "deep geeks" with significant resources. "This brought
home to me just how far we have to go," he said.

Ms. Jardin of BoingBoing said people online often argued about whether
blogs would replace mainstream media. The question is as meaningless, she
said, as asking "will farmers' markets replace restaurants?"

"One is a place for rich raw materials," she continued. "One represents a
different stage of the process."

Blogging from the tsunami, she said, is "more raw and immediate," but the
postings still lack the level of trust that has been earned by more
established media. "There is no ombudsman for the blogosphere," she said.
"One will not replace the other, but I think the two together are good for
each other."

Dr. Vaidhyanathan said he was leaving for a long-planned trip to India
today and, if possible, hoped to visit relatives in Madras. "As long as
there is electricity and Internet access, I'll blog," he said.

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 at 04:37 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/12/tsunami_aid_blo.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Susan Sontag Dies at 71

{Susan Sontag, photo: Annie Leibovitz}

via NYTimes:
Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71
By MARGALIT FOX

"Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained
irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive,
anticlimactic, original, derivative, nave, sophisticated, approachable,
aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere,
posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound,
superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable,
visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, pass, ambivalent,
tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic,
cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull."



AN APPRECIATION | SUSAN SONTAG

A Rigorous Intellectual Dressed in Glamour
By CHARLES McGRATH

OBITUARY
Susan Sontag, Writer and Social Critic, Dies at 71
By MARGALIT FOX
Susan Sontag's impassioned political pronouncements and her advocacy of
the avant-garde made her a lionized and polarizing figure in 20th-century
letters.
An Appreciation by Charles McGrath

REVIEWS OF SUSAN SONTAG'S BOOKS
'Regarding the Pain of Others'
Reviwed by JOHN LEONARD
"[A] coruscating sermon on how we picture suffering . . . Sontag of course
has done our homework for us, her usual archaeology."

'In America'
Reviewed by SARAH KERR
"Sentence by sentence, scene to scene, the writing in 'In America' is
utterly nimble. It's the ideas, somehow, that lag behind."

'Illness as Metaphor'
Reviewed by DENIS DONOGHUE
"I have read it three times, and I still find her accusations unproved.
But the book has some extraordinarily perceptive things about our
attitudes . . ."

'On Photography'
Reviewed by WILLIAM H. GASS
"Susan Sontag's brief but brilliant work on photography . . . shall surely
stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the subject . . ."

'Against Interpretation'

'The Volcano Lover: A Romance'

'AIDS and Its Metaphors'

'Under the Sign of Saturn'

'Styles of Radical Will'

'Trip to Hanoi'

'Death Kit'

'The Benefactor'

INTERVIEWS AND PROFILES
Susan Sontag Finds Romance
By LESLIE GARIS
A profile of Sontag tries to discover why "the eloquent admirer of Roland
Barthes, Elias Canetti, Antonin Artaud" had written a self-described
"romance."
Susan Sontag Found Crisis of Cancer Added a Fierce Intensity to Life
(Jan. 30, 1978)
Sontag Talks About Photography (Dec. 18, 1977)

EXCERPTS AND ESSAYS
The Decay of Cinema
By SUSAN SONTAG
In an essay reflecting on the 100-year history of film, Sontag writes,
"Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia."
Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)
Why Are We in Kosovo? (1999)
First Chapters: 'In America' | 'Regarding the Pain of Others'

MOVIE REVIEWS
Screen: Sontag's 'Promised Lands'
By NORA SAYRE
"One's ready to be moved by the subject. But the viewer almost has to
function as an editor, since the selection of the footage is so
haphazard."
Screen: 'Brother Carl' (1972)
Susan Sontag's 'Duet for Cannibals' at Festival (1969)

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 at 04:03 PM in Books | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/12/via_nytimessusa.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Art in America Heart Artblogs



12/29/04 UPDATE:
A humorous and pointed post from Tom Moody who points out how :
"Fault lines exist within this global village that are actually gaping,
sulphurous chasms patched over with hopeful cyber-cement. Here are just a
few of the divisions […]"

–and who promises to

"widen…the nascent, still largely unspoken rifts within the so-called
community of so-called art blogs. In a friendly way." oh, I think I love
this moodiest of blogs.

{image: Art in America, January Issue: thanks Todd!}

Raphael Rubenstein plugs an assortment of artblogs in the January Issue of
Art in America, a nice plug for those of us on the list (but we miss some
of our own favorites here). It first leaked among the blogs: Modern Kicks,
FallonandRosof, and Fresh Paint.

Here's the list below – click the image to read the annotations.

Artsjournal/artopia by John Perreault
Artsjournal/MAN by Tyler Green
Fallon and Rosof by Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof
Art.blogging.la by Caryn Coleman
Iconoduel by Dan Hopewell
Digitalmediatree/Tommoody by Tom Moody
From the Floor by Todd Gibson
Electricskin.com
James Wagner
Newsgrist by Joy Garnett (thanx!)
Dennis Hollingsworth
Livejournal.com/users/burgertime by Keren Richter

This is a different take altogether from the recent panel at The New
Museum, "Blogging and The Arts", hosted by Rhizome.org. The November panel
was moderated by Rhizome Director of Technology Francis Hwang and included
artist Kabir Carter, photoblogger and journalist David Gallagher, artist
and critic Tom Moody, and artist T.Whid. The discussion addressed how
blogs may change the nature of art discourse, and "ways that artists and
critics are integrating this new form of communications into their own
work." Later, Tom Moody blogged some commentary as well as T.Whid. T.Whid
also mentions in an earlier post how: Back in June, I (as well as others)
was contacted by a student name Marie Omann who was doing research on a
paper about art blogs. Just in time for the panel tomorrow, she sent me
her final paper and she also gave me permission to make it available here.
Download: Artblogs: Why Such a Timid Emergence? (268KB PDF)

In any case, AiA's treatment seems to represent an offering of different
kinds of art blogging approaches, as no two on the list are remotely alike
in style, content or intent. A blog tasting, well-rounded but by no means
complete.

Thursday, December 23, 2004 at 09:37 PM in Weblogs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/12/art_in_america_.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


NEWSgrist - where spin is art
http://newsgrist.typepad.com
Archives
http://newsgrist.net