The Peter Zumthor redesign of the Los Angelese County Museum of Art (LACMA) has been revealed. There are more photos at LAist. (via LACMA)
This week, minimalism and class pollitics, art and drugs, hackers extort web users, Zumthor redesign for LACMA revealed, and more.
Minimalism and class politics:
Those aren’t wealthy people who have a house full of expensive items they don’t need. Those are people teetering on or even below the poverty level, desperate for comfort in their homes. To point to them as a reason to start an anti-consumerism movement is just another form of social shaming. Those aren’t the people who would benefit from a minimalist life. They can’t afford to do with less.
Art and drugs have a long history:
“There was a time when art, intoxication, religion and the sacred were all the same thing,” says Mike Jay, author of High Society: Mind-altering Drugs in History and Culture.
Jay rattles through Minoans in ancient Crete and their opium habits, South Americans and hallucinogens; lotus-eaters in Homer’s “The Odyssey” and stories of witchcraft — potions and shape-shifting and communion with the natural world.
But for a modern understanding of the relationship between art and drugs, writer Thomas De Quincey is pivotal, suggests Jay. Best known for his autobiographical account of 1821, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater”, De Quincey pioneered the ‘drug confession’, a mode that set the tone for many artists since.
“[He’s] playing a slightly ironic game,” suggests Jay, “saying that to the common person [opium is] just a painkiller, but to people like me — an artist — it takes me to places you can’t even dream of or imagine.
Hackers caught a man masturbating and tried to extort him:
One day in Melbourne, when the sun was out and the birds were singing, Matt opened an email and was greeted with a video of a man wanking.
The man was him.
“There I was in all my glory,” he told triple j’s Veronica & Lewis.
He had been hacked. A ‘ransomware’ program had infected his computer allowing the hackers to film him through the webcam. He had been filmed in a compromising situation.
Now they wanted money.
“There was an email saying they were going to release footage to all my Facebook friends and people I worked with if I don’t pay them money.”
“Initially I laughed.”
He wrote back. He told them to do their worst and release the footage. But then they replied with a screenshot of his Facebook friends, and personal details from his website. He realised the threat was serious. They asked for $10,000. He began negotiating.
The Library of Congress is having trouble archiving all of Twitter, which they announced they would do in 2010:
The library has been handed a Gordian knot, an engineering, cyber, and policy challenge that grows bigger and more complicated every day—about 500 million tweets a day more complicated. Will the library finally untie it—or give in and cut the thing off?
“This is a warning as we start dealing with big data—we have to be careful what we sign up for,” said Michael Zimmer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written on the library’s efforts. “When libraries didn’t have the resources to digitize books, only a company the size of Google was able to put the money and the bodies into it. And that might be where the Library of Congress is stuck.”
This may be a first:
The International Olympics Committee prohibits press from making GIFs
Ugh. Does this mean we have to watch the whole thing? No thanks.
Some US colleges are facing a backlash from alumni who don’t like some of the recent activism on campus and are reducing their donations accordingly:
“As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
A backlash from alumni is an unexpected aftershock of the campus disruptions of the last academic year. Although fund-raisers are still gauging the extent of the effect on philanthropy, some colleges — particularly small, elite liberal arts institutions — have reported a decline in donations, accompanied by a laundry list of complaints.
Slavoj Žižek’s latest article on sexual identity is a mess, he writes:
One can argue that postgenderism is the truth of transgenderism. The universal fluidification of sexual identities unavoidably reaches its apogee in the cancellation of sex as such. Recall Marx’s brilliant analysis of how, in the French revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of Order functioned as the coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the “anonymous kingdom of the Republic.” The only way to be a royalist in general was to be a republican, and, in the same sense, the only way to be sexualized in general is to be asexual.
A critique of his piece by Sam Warren Miell points out:
It doesn’t make sense for Žižek to suggest that transgenderism is somehow a symptom which stands apart from all others. When Žizek writes that the “LGBT trend” to “deconstruct” sexual norms “reduces this tension to the fact that the plurality of sexual positions are forcefully narrowed down to the normative straightjacket of the binary opposition of masculine and feminine, with the idea that, if we get away from this straightjacket, we will get a full blossoming multiplicity of sexual positions (LGBT, etc.), each of them with its complete ontological consistency,” he makes an unwarranted leap, implying that trans people do not assume the same ontological lack as everyone else, even in spite of their gender identity, with as much or as little acknowledgement of this as is present in the cisgendered subject. Trans people have no illusions of being ‘more complete’ or fully realized sexually than their cisgendered counterparts.
President Barack Obama on being a feminist:
As a parent, helping your kids to rise above these constraints is a constant learning process. Michelle and I have raised our daughters to speak up when they see a double standard or feel unfairly judged based on their gender or race—or when they notice that happening to someone else. It’s important for them to see role models out in the world who climb to the highest levels of whatever field they choose. And yes, it’s important that their dad is a feminist, because now that’s what they expect of all men.
During a standoff situation the police in Baltimore asked Facebook to suspend a woman’s account and they did:
Baltimore County police shot and killed Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old black woman, after an hours-long standoff on Monday — during which Facebook and Instagram, at police request, temporarily shut down Gaines’ accounts.
… Police Chief Jim Johnson says Gaines was posting video of the standoff to social media as it was unfolding, which prompted police to request the deactivation of her accounts.
Gaines’ Facebook page is now reactivated; it does not have any videos visible to the public. On Instagram, one video apparently recorded during the standoff remains.
Some social media interactions with corporations are just hilarious:
A funny art-related scene from the Spaced tv series:
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.
