Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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Morning random notes: September 4, 2012.

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Would you pay $18 for a 40-minute vinyl record of previously unreleased Charles Manson songs?

Yeah, I wouldn’t, either.

The album’s title, a vulgarity that means wasting time…

I want to come back to this later and elaborate on the idea some, but I’m getting more than a little tired of the mass media being coy in their reporting. (See also: Russian punk bands.)

Vasquez turned to the funding website Kickstarter to raise several thousand dollars to pay to have the album cover printed and 500 copies of the record pressed.

This kind of bothers me, too, but I’m not sure I can articulate why.

Headline in the NYT:

Gotham: A Summer of Easy Guns and Dead Children

First paragraph:

In Harlem, Paula Shaw-Leary talks of her youngest, Matt, who got his college degree in May and was accepted to graduate school…

Matt’s death is tragic, but a 21-year-old man who has been accepted to grad school is not a child.

(Gee, doesn’t NYC have strict gun control laws?)

I don’t think I ever saw anything Michael Clarke Duncan was in, and I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of his work. But 54 is just too young. (NYT. LAT. A/V Club.)

The Frank Lloyd Wright archive is moving to New York City. This sounds like a very good thing:

The models will live at MoMA, which has extensive conservation and exhibition experience. The museum will display them in periodic presentations and special exhibitions. The papers will be housed at Avery, whose librarians will make them available to researchers and educators starting at the end of next year.

(Well, a very good thing for everyone except Mike the Musicologist, who hates NYC.)

Headline from something called “The Root”, linked from the WP site:

Few African Americans at Burning Man

“Word Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit”.

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns, Law, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes, September 3, 2012.

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

Workers of the world, unite! Dyslexics of the world, untie!

In 2009, the two-year-old Southern lifestyle magazine [Garden and Gun -DB ] lost financial support from its first publisher. Its employees, many of whom had relocated from New York City to work here, were left with dwindling buyout packages and the promise of freelance pay. Real estate developers could no longer afford to buy advertisements, and some new prospects said they would not give a cent to the magazine until the owners took “gun” out of its title.

Oh, yes. Garden and Gun. I remember them. I was considering subscribing: that is, until they refused ads from the NRA. Now they can die in a fire, as far as I am concerned.

In other news, the NYT wants you to know that you should be careful buying art online.

My big question for the day: now that Reverend Moon is dead, how long will the Washington Times be around? I’ve gotten the distinct impression that it has survived that long purely because he wanted it that way, and his successors are not as wild about the paper as he was.

Mike Nesbitt has resigned as offensive coordinator at the University of Houston. That would be two days after the season opener, which they lost 30-13 to Texas State.

I’ve been kind of tied up the past couple of days and haven’t had a chance to blog the Austin Police Department acting as agent provocateurs to Occupy Austin story. I don’t really know what to make of it, so instead I’ll refer you to the Statesman story above, and the coverage from Grits for Breakfast here. (The other problem I have with this story is that much of the coverage comes from sources I don’t read and don’t trust.)

Speaking of Grits, he also has an interesting followup on the Texas Highway Patrol Association and other similar scam organizations.

Posted in Art, Austin, Clippings, Cops, Guns, Law, Media, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 7, 2012.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

Noted art critic Robert Hughes.

A/V Club obit for Marvin Hamlisch. I expect fuller obits in the daily papers tomorrow. (I did not know, until I read it in one of the current obits, that Hamlisch was an EGOT recipient, and one of only two people to receive a Pulitzer Prize in addition to the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards. Richard Rodgers was the other one.)

The NYT is also reporting the passing of noted film critic Judith Crist.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#31 in a series)

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

This story has gotten a fair amount of attention elsewhere, but I want to highlight one aspect of it.

Ileana Sonnabend was a noted NYC art dealer who passed away in 2007. Her children inherited her art collection, which was valued at $1 billion. So far, her heirs have paid $471 million in estate taxes on the collection, selling off a large part of it to do so.

One of the pieces in the collection is a Robert Rauschenberg piece called “Canyon”.

Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.

The IRS values “Canyon” at $65 million, and wants the family to pay $29.2 million in tax.

“The ruling about the eagle is not something the Art Advisory Panel considered,” [Stephanie] Barron [senior curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art] said, adding that the work’s value is defined by its artistic worth. “It’s a stunning work of art and we all just cringed at the idea of saying that this had zero value. It just didn’t make any sense.”

But doesn’t the fact that the work can’t be sold make it of zero value anyway? Sort of by definition? And is Ms. Barron confusing aesthetic value with market value?

[Ralph E.] Lerner [lawyer for the heirs] said that since the children assert the Rauschenberg has no dollar value for estate purposes, they could not claim a charitable deduction by donating “Canyon” to a museum. If the I.R.S. were to prevail in its $65 million valuation, he said the heirs would still have to pay the $40.9 million in taxes and penalties regardless of a donation.

Posted in Art, Clippings | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#30 in a series).

Monday, July 16th, 2012

Jeremy Larner is the “business manager” for someone named Rob Dyrdek; as I understand it, Mr. Dyrdek is a skateboarder who has a show on MTV.

Point is, Mr. Larner is apparently fairly well-to-do, and describes himself as an “art geek”. Mr. Larner has several works by Shepard Fairey in his collection.

About 15 months ago, Mr. Larner won an auction for the right to sponsor a Fairey mural in the children’s wing at L.A. County-USC Medical Center, paying $30,000 for the privilege.

Mr. Larner is unhappy with the outcome and the way he was treated, and is suing for his money back.

I could snark on Mr. Fairey, or on the wisdom of paying $30,000 for his work, but it actually sounds like Mr. Larner has some legitimate gripes.

In a timeline in his lawsuit, Larner contended that he repeatedly reached out to the charity for updates on the mural but received no firm information for months. He said that after numerous queries to project manager Eli Consilvio, he received a prank phone call in November from a mutual friend and fellow art collector.

Part of Mr. Larner’s sponsorship included watching Mr. Fairey paint the mural. Unfortunately, Mr. Larner was “on vacation and unable to attend” when the mural was painted. It isn’t clear to me if this was a big deal to Mr. Larner. But:

As the months wore on, Larner grew frustrated that no dedication ceremony had occurred. [Project manager Eli] Consilvio said he told Larner that the administrative issues with the hospital were causing the delays and thought Larner understood. Larner filed a fraud and breach-of-contract suit in L.A. County Superior Court on June 25, detailing the delays and the prank call.

Posted in Art, California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, obit! watch: June 19, 2012.

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Barton Lidice Benes died on May 30th, but his obit shows up in today’s NYT.

Mr. Benes was a sculptor “who worked in materials that he called artifacts of everyday life”. For example, he did sculptures using shredded cash. He also did a series of sculptures called “Flood”, using damaged property donated by victims of the 1997 North Dakota floods.

When friends started dying of AIDS, and Mr. Benes himself tested HIV-positive, he began working in everyday materials of the epidemic — pills and capsules, intravenous tubes, HIV-infected blood and cremated human remains.

One of the interesting aspects of this obit is the detail that Mr. Benes, who lived in Greenwich Village, apparently had a close relationship with the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. NDMA exhibited his work in the 1990s, and…

…plans to build a replica of his apartment and furnish it exactly as Mr. Benes left it. Among its objects, many of them macabre, are a blackened human toe; a giant hourglass holding the mingled ashes of two of Mr. Benes’s friends, partners who died of AIDS; a gall stone removed from his friend Larry Hagman, the actor; and a stuffed giraffe’s head.

I’m curious how the relationship between Mr. Benes and NDMA developed. It just seems odd that he’d be that close to an art museum in what New Yorkers consider “flyover country”. It also seems odd that he had so much trouble exhibiting his “transgressive” art in NYC.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: June 11, 2012.

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Two stories by way of Lawrence:

This odd one about a scientist who works for the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas trying to stop approval of a $20 million dollar grant to Rice University and M.D. Anderson. Lawrence sent it to me and asked if I could make heads or tails out of it; I think I can, but it seems to me to be one of those HouChron stories that’s like a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

I’m not sure if this has been on FARK yet, but since Lawrence sent it to me, I’m linking to it anyway as part of the “Art, damn it! Art!” watch: a 200-foot-long knitted rabbit on the side of an Italian mountain.

The NYT has a story I find kind of odd about the NYPD Accident Investigations Squad.  Basically, the AIS investigates traffic accidents: “But they do so only in cases of death or when a victim is deemed likely to die.”
The problem, according to the NYT, is that AIS sometimes doesn’t investigate accidents where the victim is not immediately dead; if the person dies days later, evidence may be “lost”.

I have two problems with this, both related to the incident the NYT cites:

  1. “That delay, Mr. Stevens said, meant that most of the evidence from the crash — skid marks and surveillance video, witness accounts, and alcohol in the driver’s bloodstream — had been lost.” How was it lost? The way I read that sentence, the AIS started to collect the data, then stopped because the victim was still alive (she died three days later). Did they throw away what they had already collected? That seems like an…odd choice, to say the least.
  2. Reinforcing point 1 is the fact that the NYT is able to report that the driver in the accident had a 0.07 BAC. So at least some evidence was preserved. “Felony charges were considered…” What felony charges? 0.07 is below the legal limit, as far as I know. And “those charges were dropped because the police testing equipment had not been properly calibrated”. Uh-huh. That’s certainly interesting, and I wish the NYT had gone into more detail on the calibration issue.

Edited to add: It occurs to me that some folks might be as confused as I was by the NYT references to the Highway Patrol and the NYPD. The state of New York does have a state police agency, the New York State Police (whose website is currently broken, it seems). There is also a group within the NYPD called the Highway Patrol “primarily responsible for patrolling and maintaining traffic safety on limited-access highways within New York City.” So it isn’t a statewide police agency in the Broderick Crawford sense, but a confusingly named NYPD division. Got it.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law | 1 Comment »

Important safety tip. (#12 in a series)

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

This one’s a quickie: if you’re going to steal a car, you probably shouldn’t steal an art car.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Law, Safety | 2 Comments »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#29 in a series).

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

Sol LeWitt was a conceptual artist. (He passed away in 2007.)

One of his works was “Wall Drawing #448″. This work has two parts. Part one is a list of instructions on how to create a wall drawing. Part two is an example of what that drawing would look like.

In 2008, the owner of the work consigned it to a gallery in Chicago.

The gallery lost the instructions. The owner is suing, claiming that the instructions are basically a certificate of authenticity:

“The unique nature of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings renders their accompanying certificates of authenticity critical to the works’ value,” the complaint reads, noting that every certificate says: “This certification is the signature for the wall drawing and must accompany the wall drawing if it is sold or otherwise transferred.”

The gallery says their insurance won’t cover the loss (I’d really like to know why) and apparently tried to settle with the owner. The owner is asking for a minimum of $350,000.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 30, 2012.

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

Noted guitarist Doc Watson.

Leo Dillon. Leo and his wife Diane won two Caldecott medals back to back for their work as illustrators. They also worked on many SF books during the “New Wave” era, including doing illustrations for many of Harlan Ellison’s works.

Posted in Art, Books, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Primary colors.

Monday, May 21st, 2012

Over at Tam’s place, she asks the musical question: “What is a man’s favorite color for a gun?”

I thought I’d answer over here, since the comments there are kind of cluttered, and I want to see if there’s anyone out there that feels the same way I do.

Here’s the thing: I don’t like shiny guns. There’s a part of me that says I have tacticool ninja reasons for that: “O. M. G. The reflected sunlight off of my nickel plated Model 29 might give my position away!” But I think my reasons go deeper than that, though I can’t really articulate them beyond: shiny guns don’t look right to me.

That goes for stainless steel, too: I acknowledge the practicality of stainless, and can see good reasons for owning something like a Kit Gun in stainless. But it still doesn’t look right or feel right to me.

Make mine blued.

I think that has something to do with my upbringing. My dad didn’t own anything in nickel or stainless, I don’t think my grandfather on his side of the family did, and I want to say the same thing goes for at least one of my uncles on that side as well. I guess I didn’t grow up with an appreciation for shiny finishes, or with a practical need for stainless steel.

How about some of you other gun bloggers? If you’re a big nickel or stainless steel fan, do you think part of it may be your upbringing? Did you have a father or uncle or aunt who carried a nickel plated gun in the line of duty? Did you grow up on one of the coasts, or around water, where stainless steel was the most practical thing to own?

Posted in Art, Guns | 4 Comments »

Administrative note.

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

Graduation is over. Back on your heads.

More seriously, the time for introspection has passed. (Also the time for action.) Expect a return to snark, guns, snark, cops, snark, pop culture, snark, art, and snark.

I still have a few things to finish up: thank you notes are being written and mailed, and I need to go through the photos and pull some out for posting.

In the meantime, frankly, things have been kind of slow. I’m not finding a lot of blog fodder; FARK has picked up most of the good stuff, including some “Art, damn it, art!” fodder.

Lawrence did send me an intriguing link yesterday about Rielle Hunter, equestrian, and how her father paid a hit man to kill one of her horses. That William Nack story rings a bell with me, like I’ve read it before, but I don’t remember where. Setting aside the John Edwards angle, it is a fascinating crime story. It reminds me of Skip Hollandsworth’s “The Killing of Alydar”, which was anthologized in one of the The Best American Crime Writing volumes, and which I also commend to your attention. (I believe the BugMeNot link on the side will let you read the full version of the story online, but BugMeNot is blocked at the office, so I can’t verify that.)

I would also like to add one final note, for the record: I will put my family, friends, and coworkers up against any other group of people for sheer concentrated awesomeness. Thanks, gang.

Posted in Admin, Art, Horses, Law, Politics, School, Thanks | Comments Closed

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