Yes

Ron Mueck continued

If this doesn’t make your pecker tingle, you are a gay.

Rad sculptures. Big ups.

I dig it, at least. It would be awesome to see some of his stuff in person, methinks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Mueck

True art.

I found this in a truck stop in Georgia today. I passed on buying it since it was $17.99, but now I’m kicking myself because that’s a small price to pay for such godliness. Behold.

The future of academic art

It’s what the students want.
Watch the whole thing.

Master of the Wind

Time to season those dutch ovens. I challenge you fart terrorists to hold your lady under the sheets, fart like brown magic, and sing this entire song:

Explaining pictures to a dead hare

Performance

I don’t like it often.

Somebody put a dart in my neck

I just had a good name for a band: Legion of Jeff.
These would be the lyrics to their hit single:

“The other approach, which could be called vanitas, emphasizes content, and throws obstacles in the way of pure aesthetic enjoyment by the inclusion of objects laden with meaning and interest, objects which cannot be easily aestheticized. The significance of the skull, for example, it’s meaning for us as mortals, cannot be easily ignored. Like many other classic vanitas symbols (the dead animal, over-ripe fruit, crucifix, etc.), it is essentially an object of fascination and distaste. Thus, instead of the calm, unimpeachable good taste of formal still life, vanitas tends to be dramatic, conflicted, anxious, morbid, ironic and even (deliberately) tasteless.

I think the fact that I attempt both strategies may confound; most still life painters tend to stay on one or other side of this divide, and this often reflects differences of temperament and belief. I know my audience is similarly divided; those who admire, above all, my grapes or ‘classical’ still lives tend to be vexed by the vanitas works. I regard vanitas and formal still life almost as independent sub-genres with their own rules and standards, and, like tragedy and comedy, see no reason why one cannot practice both.

Formal still life is perhaps the more difficult to practice, partly because of the technical discipline it requires, but also because its subject matter is more restricted; it tends to confine itself, not only to commonplace objects, but to objects with a neutral or low semantic charge. Though a mobile phone, for example, is certainly a commonplace object these days, placing one in a formal still life would be a highly unorthodox and dangerous move, because it would tend to disrupt any classic effect of timeless serenity. Nokia or Siemens? Makes and models replace each other so fast that such a picture is bound to date quickly, and instead of inviting aesthetic contemplation, it may remind you to check your messages. Because of such issues, the subject matter of formal still life tends to revolve around a stock of simple, traditional objects: baskets, bowls and bottles, flowers and fruit; the sort of things one might have found on domestic tables at any point in the last few hundred years. Such easily familiar objects help feed a dream of peace, of domestic comfort and sufficiency, and perhaps a certain nostalgia for a simpler, more basic existence. I see nothing wrong with this, but it does mean that the formal approach can depend as much for its effect on what is suppressed and excluded as what is actually in the picture, and such strict canons of good taste do make it harder to avoid the cliché, harder to innovate. It may be possible to make a classic still life with, say, television sets and plastic packaging, but it is probably more difficult to do it well.”

My genre

Food for thought from the (f)artblogoshphere. Get real. When will it be a concern whether a painting is crap or not? Even though it’s shitty, I like the painting below because that’s how rabbits really look at you, and it has a human ass:

AND…….here is an extract from a forthcoming essay by Steve Baker exploring
the power of dead animal bodies in postmodern art.
Can contemporary art productively address the killing of animals? The art of recent decades has made increasing use of animal imagery (and indeed of animals themselves), and by no means only in a symbolic or sentimental context. This art has often been seen as both ethically and aesthetically disturbing, and it is hard to disentangle ethical and aesthetic questions in these circumstances: the desire of some artists to address a subject such as the killing of animals may well be driven by ethical concerns, but the manner in which they try to do so will almost inevitably bring aesthetic considerations into play.