The jailed Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei is part of a new cultural movement that’s using people power to challenge society’s vested interests If this is a new avant-garde then it’s operating on a different set of aesthetic rules to previous generations of political art. Typically, artists have wanted us to be as outraged as …
Continue reading “People power: It’s the taking part that counts – The Independent”
Artists plan to encase vacant Detroit home in ice: “To draw attention to foreclosures that have battered the region.” Yeah? is there a big problem with people not knowing about foreclosures and vacant housing in Michigan? I think that info is kind of, you know, out there. Why not do this in Westchester County or …
(check 1:30 in) See, what happens is, you see this, and then you go home and you decide you’re going to do that thing that you’ve always wanted to. There is a direct line from him painting to you acting, he tells me.
This is a beautiful example of how activist-pranksters can exploit bureaucracy’s Achilles heel. The artist commissioned for this work, David Cerny “is notorious for thumbing his nose at the establishment,” says the article. I mean, just look at his website. The man once painted a tank, part of a a soviet war memorial in the …
n aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms….The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of …
Words do their jobs but what I’m doing here says a lot more.
Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ’em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the activists …
Mark Fiore is a political Flash cartoonist who cranks out a new short almost every week. He is clearly a liberal Democrat and his cartoons slant that way, but even when I find the ideas annoying or simplistic, or superficially critical, the cartoons are still funny. There are objectively funny moments (if such things can …
For those not fortunate enough to remember watching The State, it was a brilliant comedy show often surreal or scatalogicaly political. This skit rolls with a black comedy to match the best Monty Python, and gets the viewer with a brujtally funny depiction of Eastern Europe after the Iron Curtain fell. No doubt, the Soviet …
In 1970, a fourteen year old boy named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Montreal room during their “peace in.” The following animated short, I Met the Walrus, is based on a recording of their conversations. It was nominated for an Oscar for “best animated short” at the 2008 Academy Awards, and …
This is a new video from 23/6.com a political-ish comedy site. The video is about a serious issue, but treats it in a comical-ish way. Which is a fine strategy if done well, but I there’s just not quite enough substance here. All you really get from the video is that there’s a terrorist watch …
I read Timequake (one of Vonnegut’s last books) recently and was surprised to see how often it related to the How to Win project. The novel isn’t about any one theme, but ideas of art and affecting change are woven throughout. Vonnegut seems to be reflecting on how his literature has connected with his politics. …
The winning entry for the environment category in this year’s Media that Matters Film Festival was a short animated film about the dangers of electronic waste. And what consumers can do to help the problem. I’m not sure if I find it effective or annoying. You decide.
Play is one of the earliest and most important activities of mammals; helping adolescents learn the skills they need to survive. Games take the free play of the animal kingdom and apply rules and constraints, which have the ability to teach and develop the values and beliefs of a culture. The chess queen developed as …
This mythology of the lone genius, isolated from society, and relieved of social responsibility, is summed up for me in these comments by the painter Georg Baselitz: “The artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does. There is no communication …
Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp – Interview ArtForum, April, 2003 DOUGLAS CRIMP: One of your members, Mark Simpson, is no longer with us. Perhaps we can officially dedicate our remarks here to his memory. When did Mark die? TOM KALIN: Mark died of AIDS on November 10, 1996. DC: Okay, let’s begin with a …
For the past four years, Critical Art Ensemble’s Steve Kurtz has been a martyr in the world of activist art, the victim of overzealous FBI investigatory impropriety. The case against him was utterly absurd, Kafka-esque even. Thankfully,though, the judge saw reason this month and his case was finally dismissed. Now, he has an exhibit entitled …
via: Time When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the …
BERKELEY, California — For most people, photographing something that isn’t there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen. His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit — despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don’t exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California …
Continue reading “Photographer Documents Secret Satellites — All 189 of Them”
Q: Of the various projects the Anti-Advertising Agency has been involved in, which ones do you think have been most successful? A: I don’t really know for sure. To know we would have to do what is done in any marketing campaign, which is an impartial evaluation — surveys, testing, etc. And we don’t have …
Continue reading “good answer to a relevant question by some guy”
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