hello@caseyagollan.com
@caseyg on Twitter
My major praise for the exhibition is the extraordinary installation of highly aggressive works, each of which would probably prefer to be all alone in the room—if not in the universe.Peter Schjeldahl — The Dakis Joannou collection, The New Yorker
“Turbo“, 2008 by Baptiste Debombourg.
Tom Moody dissects this piece of “internet aware art” from VVORK, which he defines, in one sense, as “offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind.”
Neat idea but it doesn’t need to exist as a piece—you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the “product” being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic’s visit who noticed the piece only “read” from a couple of angles and didn’t hold up to more than a few seconds’ study? Vvork means never having to explain—success is presumed.
One of my teachers says that a good work of art can’t be read like a sentence.
Small Wonder: 41 Cooper Square: Observatory: Design Observer
A pretty scathing review of the new Cooper building is on the front page of Design Observer today. As a student who is in the building nearly every day for hours on end, generally loves it and feels lucky to be there, I have to wonder how anyone can take this review seriously:
When I originally embarked on this review, I wanted to talk about the building as an educational space. Most other reviews I had read were filed before students and faculty moved in, even, in the case of the New York Times, before the building was finished. But on my tour I was whisked past the classrooms, and told not to hang around with a notebook for fear of disturbing the students.
It reminds me of a point I raised in discussion with Liza in the first issue of Process: there’s a whole world of jargon and culture surrounding architecture but isn’t what really matters in architecture how well the building works for the people who inhabit it every day?
I know that the school is pretty uptight about keeping the public out of the building but reviewing a building that you’ve purportedly been “whisked” through is like reviewing a movie that you’ve watched on fast forward.
Yes it’s got a lot of problems (namely slow elevators), but nearly every day I find new things to like about the designed space we’ve generously been given. The reviews have me disappointed.
Every judge – there are about sixty of us – had to give a mark between one (low) and five (high) to each of 75 entries. As each magazine had to submit three different issues, that meant there were 225 magazines to look through. However much you like magazines that’s a lot of looking.magCulture.com / editorial design
An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.
An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.
An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.
[… further explanations, then …]
A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.
E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.
An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.
If every critic — ala Ebert, in his way — would disclose the yardstick by which he generates the “stars,” “thumbs,” or “Little Man” of his reviews, it would go a long way toward educating readers; as well as, I’d argue, potentially helping revive the increasingly one-star interest in professional arts criticism.
(via 43Folders)
