May 13, 2017
by Anthony C.
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This is an update to an earlier story that follows new developments in the Pepe meme story: Pepe’s death! Faithful readers of this site will be familiar with the saga of the internet meme Pepe the Frog. (For those of you who missed it, my earlier post on Pepe and the nature and value of internet memes is here.) The latest update: Pepe’s death! But first, a bit of background:
April 19, 2017
by Alex King
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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.” Now everyone is talking about whether or not he’s a performance artist.
April 4, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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There’s a post over at the general interest philosophy blog Daily Nous that might be of interest to our readers. Susanna Berger, assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California, has posted an excerpt adapted from her book, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2017). From Berger: I show how their inventive iconography inspired new visualizations of thought in a range of drawn and printed sources, including student lecture notebooks, printed books, and alba amicorum (friendship albums). The book culminates with a new study of the celebrated frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan. I argue that previous accounts of the print have failed to capture the full complexity of this etching and offer a new, if complex, account of this famous image—one which emphasizes the process of the state’s generation. Artists and philosophers invested significant amounts of … Continue reading
March 31, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Are music recordings their own type of musical instrument? How does timbre (vs. pitch, harmony, etc.) affect musical experience? What, really, is the point of music theory? And is vaporwave really dead? (Do you, Dear Reader, not yet know what vaporwave is – or was?) All these questions and more are addressed in this excellent video (from 2016 that I just discovered…) by YouTuber and musician Adam Neely.
February 21, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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I’m going to go ahead and say Saatchi isn’t really that cutting edge on this one. People have been doing self-portraits for a long-ass time. Maybe those don’t count as “selfies” though? In any event, the famous Saatchi Gallery will host a show this spring called “From Selfie to Self-Expression”. This is funded together with the enormous Chinese telecom company Huawei. (Hm, I wonder why they’d be interested in selfies.) Maybe most exciting is for those artistic sorts who read the blog: You can enter your own selfie for a chance to be shown at Saatchi! They’re currently holding a selfie competition (entry rules here), open until March 12, 2017. You have to submit images via their website interface. For whatever reason, you can’t just post an Instagram with the #SaatchiSelfie hashtag and be entered. Although they do want you to use that hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, etc. Or you can just scope out … Continue reading
February 10, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Survey says… No. :'( But tattoos can be, and many other things. Internet-based market research company YouGov asked over 1500 Brits whether they thought various mediums could be art. Their results: Unsurprisingly, results varied a lot across age groups, and some across class. Take a look at YouGov’s write-up of these surveys, and their detailed survey results. This updates some older results they got in 2014. Well, I guess we can shut things down around here. Thanks to everyone for playing! p.s. But seriously, stay tuned for the next JAAC x AFB Discussion on this beloved non-art-form. We’ll be discussing Grant Tavinor’s JAAC paper “What’s My Motivation? Video Games and Interpretive Performance”. Photo credit: Ryan Quick, The Art of Video Games via Flickr
February 1, 2017
by Rebecca Millsop
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Check out one way we could make America great again by reading a new article up on Artsy, written by Tess Thackara: “What We Can Learn from the Brief Period When the Government Employed Artists”. Learn about how the Works Progress Administration (WPA) supported artists and diversity in the arts for a brief time in American history…
January 26, 2017
by Anthony C.
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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Donald Trump Jr. (@donaldjtrumpjr) Editor’s note: This story has a Part II, with updates on Pepe’s death! In the waning days of last fall’s presidential election a frog took center stage. In early September, Donald Trump Jr. posted an image on Instagram featuring his father leading “The Deplorables.” The image is intended to be a response to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark. However, what catches one’s eye is a curious depiction of a green frog wearing a Trump wig. The Clinton campaign quickly pointed out that the frog is an instance of an internet meme known as Pepe the Frog and denounced Trump for his campaign’s usage of the meme due to its associations with white supremacy and the alt-right. Not long after, the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its online database of hate symbols.
January 20, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Did you know that Donald Trump’s favorite movie is Citizen Kane? Did you know that the famed film director (and one-time Berkeley philosophy PhD candidate) Errol Morris interviewed him about it? And did you know that LitHub’s Anthony Audi interviewed Errol Morris about that? On Rosebud, Morris recalls: It’s fun to hear Trump talk about how Rosebud somehow works, the metaphor works, “I don’t know why it works, but it works. After all, Steven Spielberg paid a lot of money for it, so it must work. Paid a lot of money, maybe seven figures, six figures.” This comment is in reference to Spielberg’s having purchased the sled used in the film for $60,500 in 1982. (In fairness, that is six figures in 2008 dollars – about $135k.) Humor aside, Trump seems to be suggesting an aesthetic theory on which money is evidence of – or perhaps constitutive of – quality. (Surprising, … Continue reading
January 10, 2017
by Alex King
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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: receives an email from a distressed teacher who doesn’t understand the answers discovers poor formatting that adds to the confusion finds the questions in question cannot, ultimately, answer them 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 … Continue reading
