Let’s talk about the Humanity Star. For those of you who haven’t heard about it, it’s a small satellite that’s been launched into space by New Zealand company Rocket Lab, led by CEO Peter Beck. This satellite is different, though. It’s art. Continue reading
In September this year, French-Luxembourgian performance artist Deborah De Robertis exposed her vagina in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.
A few days ago, she was acquitted of charges of sexual exhibitionism by Paris’s High Court. Why? Because (a) her intent was not sexual in nature, and (b) the “material element of the crime” was missing (= you couldn’t *see* her genitalia because pubic hair obscured it). (Yes, you may giggle now.) Continue reading
Comic artist Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal talks about art:
And the aftercomic, for those of you interested in questions about representation and depiction:
And the referenced work, for your viewing pleasure, which has hilariously become Cesena’s profile pic on his Wikipedia page:
According to Wikipedia: “It was widely said that when Cesena complained to the Pope, the pontiff joked that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell and the portrait would have to remain.”
Performance art has always inhabited an ambiguous space between everyday behavior and marked-off ‘art’ behavior.
And now ultra-conservative Infowars’ Alex Jones says that his vitriolic on-air personality is performance art. He refers to a recent incident as “clearly tongue-in-cheek and basically art performance, as I do in my rants, which I admit I do, as a form of art.”
screenshot from this video on Jones’ YouTube channel
Now everyone is talking about whether or not he’s a performance artist. Continue reading
screenshot from the comic “Want A New Emoji?” by Andy Warner
[Note: An updated, more detailed version of this post was published as “A Plea for Emoji” in the American Society for Aesthetics newsletter.]
First, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. “Emoji(s)” are things like this: [😀🤔], not emoticons like : ) or (T_T) or ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or ㅇㅅㅇ. (Note: in this post, emoji will be flagged by square brackets so that if you can’t see them, you’ll at least know roughly what you’re missing.) Continue reading
I must alert you to an awesome piece by poet Sara Holbrook on HuffPo, where she explains that Texas used two of her poems for middle school standardized tests.
Holbrook:
The narration of her thought process going through the questions is also delightful.
At one point, she writes:
Parents, educators, legislators, readers of news reports: STOP TAKING THESE TEST RESULTS SERIOUSLY
Idiotic, hair-splitting questions pertaining to nothing, insufficient training, profit-driven motives on the part of the testing companies, and test results that simply reveal the income and education level of the parents.
All very fair. But then a bit of intentionalism to finish it all off!
My final reflection is this: any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich. Mostly test makers do this to dead people who can’t protest. But I’m not dead.
I protest.
Whoa – okay. Now the little dose of philosophy:
She definitely thinks she has the final word on how her poetry is interpreted! But like, does she really? Maybe she’s a good poet but a bad interpreter. (I’ll admit that the questions and answers do in fact seem a little silly. And I’ll be the first to throw down about how terrible standardized testing is.) But in principle, there’s no reason to think that just because she can’t answer the questions, they’re bad questions. Right? What do you guys think?
Go read the whole thing on Huffington Post.
You might think that you can’t, like, own a color, man.
But you’d be wrong. (And actually you’d have been wrong for a while. See Yves Klein Blue.)
Context: Maybe you remember the dustup earlier this year when superstar artist Anish Kapoor acquired the exclusive rights to (artistic) use of Vantablack, the blackest black in the world. Check it out:
you can totally see through your screen that it’s the blackest black in existence, right?
Snarky remarks aside, it seems to make the aluminum look downright velvety. Artists were (reasonably) pissed about not being able to use this.
One such artist took revenge. Stuart Semple has developed the pinkest pink in existence. Check it out:
it’s definitely pinker than this image can depict
And he’s making it available to everybody except Kapoor. Even you* can go grab a jar for £3.99.
*Unless you’re Anish, in which case, wow! We’re super flattered. Click-like-share this blog with your friends!
He’s also developed the glitteriest glitter, which is about twice the price of the pinkest pink, and also available to anybody except Kapoor.
so why is everybody just talking about the pink?
Real questions: Are these really the pinkest pink and glitteriest glitter? On what sort of scale? Is this just a publicity stunt? Was what Kapoor did just a publicity stunt? Does any of that matter? And is it a problem for the future of art, now that you can actually own certain colors? Or is it no big deal?
Read more:
What follows is a guest post by Alex King (Buffalo).
It’s a sad truth that aesthetics isn’t taken particularly seriously in the contemporary philosophical scene. And I think Bence Nanay is right to suggest that this is in part due to the perceived elitism of aesthetics. In this post, I’ll argue that we can make progress on this front by discussing an issue of independent philosophical interest: the distinction between high and low art and between so-called “highbrow” and “lowbrow” audiences. The moral, basically, will be this: Quit being so judgy.
Continue reading
