Antoine Terrieux’s kinetic hair dryer installations, including this one with hair dryers and a paper airplane, are quite impressive. (via Colossal)
This week, Malevich’s “Black Square,” paying comic artists, sexism in club culture, Egyptian photo archive goes Creative Commons, Irish slaves, encyclopedia of pasta, and more.
The Baffler has a piece on “the Internet,” and Jacob Silverman wants us to know that it doesn’t exist:
We fall back on “the Internet” because it gives us a rhetorical life raft to hang onto amidst an overwhelming tide of information or a piece of sardonic shorthand to utter with a wink and a grimace, much like “never read the comments.” It also reflects a strange irony about today’s culture: despite being highly distributed, and despite offering an outlet for every subculture and niche interest and political quirk, what we think of the Internet often does feel rather uniform and monolithic.
Tom Ginsburg thinks we revere the Magna Carta too much and we should stop:
But its fame rests on several myths. First, it wasn’t effective. In fact, it was a failure … A second myth is that it was the first document of its type. Writing in 1908, Woodrow Wilson called it the beginning of constitutional government. But in fact, it was only one of many documents from the period, in England and elsewhere, codifying limitations on government power.
A third myth is that the document was a ringing endorsement of liberty. Even a cursory reading reveals a number of oddities. One clause prevents Jews from charging interest on a debt held by an underage heir. Another limits women’s ability to bear witness to certain homicides. A third requires the removal of fish traps from the Thames.
Thoughts on Kazimir Malevich’s “The Black Square” (c. 1914):
Malevich also wasn’t expecting the Square, although he was searching for it. In the period before the invention of “Suprematism” (Malevich’s term), he preached “Alogism,” an attempt to escape the boundaries of common sense; preached “the struggle against Logism, naturalness, philistine sensibilities and prejudices.” His call to action was heard, and the Square appeared before him, absorbing him in itself. Malevich had every right to be proud of the celebrity afforded him by his deal with the Devil. And proud he was. I don’t know if he noticed the ambiguity that came with this celebrity status. “The painter’s most famous work” means that other works were less famous, less important, less enigmatic; in other words, they were less worthy. And it’s true—next to “The Black Square,” all his other works lose lustre. He has a series of canvases of geometric, brightly colored peasants with empty ovals for faces that look like transparent, unfertilized eggs. They are colorful, decorative paintings, but they come across as a tiny and insignificant stew of rainbow colors, before they, swirling for the last time, mix in a colorful funnel and disappear into the bottomless pit that is “The Black Square.” He has landscapes—pinkish, impressionistic, very run of the mill—the kind painted by many, and often better. Toward the end of his life, he tried to return to figurative art, and those attempts look predictably bad: these aren’t people but, rather, embalmed corpses and waxed dolls, tensely peering out from the frames of their clothing, as if they’ve been cut out of colorful bits of fabric, scraps and leftovers from the “Peasants” series. Of course, when one reaches the top, the only way is down. The terrible truth was that, at the top, there was nothingness.
Does club culture have a sexism problem?
… the most mendacious and widespread bigotry in clubbing remains sexism. Maceo Plex’s patronising reaction in 2013 to producer and DJ Nina Kraviz getting interviewed in a bubble bath are backed up by the countless keyboard warriors who regularly feel threatened by an attractive woman making techno. Holly Herndon, in a Guardian interview, drolly noted: “When I first started releasing music I was only compared to women I sounded nothing at all like. Then I graduated to being compared to male geniuses I’ve supposedly been influenced by.” The verymalelineups Tumblr charts just how dominant men still are in the supposedly emancipated arena of the dance underground. Even at credible techno events, Ibizan clubs are full of women dancing in cages, and the visual language of mainstream dance is based around ogling bikini shots. Sexual harassment is still an epidemic on dancefloors.
This controversial opinion is worth reading, particularly since Hyperallergic has been publishing a series on BDS and its impact on the arts. Dmitry Shumsky writes about “How BDS Is Actually Perpetuating the Occupation” (you need to register to read it, but it is free):
Thus, the international boycott weapon should be aimed in a careful and focused way against the occupation and the settlements. Of course, some people will find it hard to clearly differentiate between the “territories” and “Israel,” when the institutional, economic and cultural connections between the occupying State of Israel and its colonialist enterprise in the post-1967 territories are unequivocal. But whether it’s a naïve question, or one that winks at annexation, the answer is that is certainly possible. The Israeli organizations and institutions and companies that operate in sovereign Israeli territory that is recognized under international law should not be subjected to a boycott, even if they have branches in the occupied territories, just as there should be no thought of boycotting foreign countries and institutions that have cooperation and economic or cultural ties with the settlements.
Like the institutions and businesses inside Israel, they should be continually called upon to join a boycott of the occupation and settlement project. An effort should be made to persuade them to cut off all ties with the international criminal enterprise that is enslaving the Palestinian people contrary to “the law of nations” and gnawing away at the existential infrastructure of the State of Israel, which arose and continues to exist thanks to that same “law of nations.”
A funny (and made up) conversation between Republican Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush and his logo designer:
Heidi MacDonald of The Beat comic blog looks at being a comic artist by the numbers:
Some titles I can’t improve on: “Some Urban Homesteader Is Living In a Bucolic Cabin on a Roof in Manhattan.” Yup:
It was spotted by photographer George Steinmetz. (via Gothamist)
Recently there has been more discussion about the Irish slaves in the New World during the 17th and 18th centuries. Some people believe it is an exaggeration to call them slaves, but a new book by Don Gordon and Michael Walsh exposes what they say was slavery on a massive scale:
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Cairo-based independent journalist Hossam عمو حسام(aka @3arabawy) has placed all his photojournalism from 2003–11 online under a Creative Commons license:
It includes his important images from the January 25th “revolution” in Egypt.
Scouting NY has incredible images of a beautiful and hidden lobby on West 73rd Street in Manhattan … and there are Masons involved (of course):
(via Scouting NY)
And what you’ve always wanted — a guide to pasta shapes:
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
The BDS logic is pretty dodgy. And unsupportable, finally. Worth reading miko peled for a definition of what sovereign israel actually means. If you are supportive of the occupation, period, then you are to be boycotted.