Tomorrow Museum » wg sebald

Peter Schjeldahl wasn’t just annoyed with “After Nature” at the New Museum, he’s also underwhelmed by the show’s literary influence: WG Sebald’s book of the same name, “If the common run of contemporary art risks triviality in the pursuit of seduction, the new kind incurs hysteria as a toll of earnest intensity. Emotional reach exceeds formal grasp throughout the show, and certain melodramatic lurches fail entirely. (I don’t care what Robert Kusmirowski intends by his painstaking reconstruction of the Una-bomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin; it’s dumb.)… Existentialist standards of authenticity may be back in force, however fleetingly. How much can we bear of art that, like Sebald’s writing, glories in bottomless malaise? I expect we’ll find out.” Hrag Vartanian was less forgiving: “The horse with its head in the wall (Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2007) was the most arresting work on display. I imagined that the horse wasn’t dead as much as escaping the pretentious curatorial premise.”

Posted by Joanne on Aug 5, 2008 | Comments | Link

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- Bakhtawar Bhutto wrote a rap song to honor her mother. Video on BBC.
- The series (On the Wing) made in 1999 by Nedko Solakov. Text printed on six Air Luxor Boeing 737 planes. (via.)
- "As far back as 1958, he was actually thinking of ways to project his writing onto external media space, concocting an ‘entire unpublished novel designed to go on billboards’, according to Martin Bax, Ballard’s one-time editor. For Ballard, Bax explains, the idea was that advertising was so invasive, so intimately integrated with everyday life, it was virtually the only thing people read and truly pay attention to, if only on a subconscious level. Therefore a novel, to have the maximum impact, should be designed as advertising." That begins a fascinating post from start to finish from Ballardian on advertising, car culture, and ... Corey ("Take off your glasses") Delaney.
- Who Would Tag Over a Marriage Proposal?
- NYT on ex-bankers blowing unemployment checks on MediaBistro classes, starting sketch comedy troupes, and "completing" their screenplays and novels.
- I spent most of today and yesterday with the wonderful John Adams miniseries, reminding me to finally look up the origin of the name of his hometown Braintree, MA. It was named after the town in Essex. The most interesting (and likely) theory is it comes from the "abundance of walnut trees growing in the area."
- Is that a fake letter or is someone really complaining Iceland is cold in February? Another crazy person writes that "Paris is a Third World country masquerading as a civilized society." Here's what LA Times readers think of popular vacation destinations. Seattle: "boring." Lima: "unhappy people." Bali: "poverty everywhere and beggars." Lake Tahoe: "second-rate scenery." Greece: "stinky, crowded." Istanbul: "filthy." Don't even think about going to Austin, you're better off checking out "Honolulu or St. Augustine, Fla." (WTF?) Even the Grand Canyon is "certainly a geological sight to behold" but "the campgrounds are atrocious, about as charming as pitching a tent in the alley behind your local big-box store." (via Doree who adds, "Amazing. People will complain about anything!")
- "Cities that attract unusual amounts of attention from the creators of science fiction works tend to be those that look in some way futuristic, as Shanghai of the early 1900s with its neon lights and macadamized roads did to many Chinese, and as Shanghai of the present with its giant video displays and Magnetic levitation trains now does to people of many nationalities. But one distinctive thing about most—perhaps even all—works set in a Shanghai of times to come has been that, whether or not these imagined cities are filled with futuristic technologies it may be, traces of the cosmopolitanism of the local past are carried forward into them as well." writes Jeffrey Wasserstrom in an overview of Chinese science fiction from set-in-Shanghai sf like The Diamond Age to the first Chinese science fiction novel, Yueqiu zhimindi xiaoshuo [Tales of Moon Colonization] published in 1904. As Wasserstrom wrote earlier in A brief history of Shanghai's future, at that time "Shanghailanders did not, however, think of their city as futuristic, nor did foreign visitors. When Westerners enthused about the metropolis, it was because it offered up so many of the conveniences that were available in European and American cities of the day, despite being located in exotic China."
- Scored this stainless steel binocular shaped flask for $2 at the local Target. I'm going to put Brandy in one eyepiece and Benedictine in the other.
- The Tomorrow Museum was thrilled to make Fimoculous' 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008 (It's the second thing I have in common with Kanye West this week.) Check out this awesome diverse list. Also, Rex Sorgatz is on NPR Talk of the Nation today to discuss it.
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