Rachel Harrison and Nayland Blake BOMB 105/Fall 2008, ART

Below is one my favorite of many exchanges from their Bomb magazine discussion:

Rachel Harrison You were saying that you don’t see any issues in the art world today.

Nayland Blake Yeah, I really don’t see any.

RH Implying that artists used to have issues?

NB That there used to be a consensus of what ideas the community of artists was grappling with, but it broke down at least ten years ago. Do you hear friends talking about having to take a stand for or against something in their work?

RH Yes and no. But if we look back into previous decades we could find a time when art was an argument, and artists were arguing with each other. I feel it’s in the air not to piss anyone off too much. The art world is so big right now—there are many different pockets in which you can fall, so many different groups that form. Yet I don’t think that those groups come out of artistic practices.

NB Things are more organized around scenes than political positions; it’s about clusters of people socializing. Part of that diffusion is evidence of the virtualization of so much of the cultural discussion.

RH Everyone looks at art online now, and with the exception of video art that is made for YouTube, everything is mediated. For a long time art historians have written about art by looking at reproductions, and now the Internet takes this even further. I wasn’t able to travel to Munster to see Sculpture Projects, but I could find images of Mike Kelley’s petting zoo on Flickr soon after it opened. I’m not sure what I got from this except a superficial idea of the appearance of the work. I certainly didn’t know how it smelled. Someone told me the animals were going crazy from the sound. People assume they know an artwork from looking at pictures, but what do they really get from that?

Read full text HERE.

Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Minor Threat and The Evens: Interview on The Sound of Young America

Ian MacKaye is a punk rock legend. His bands have included Minor Threat, Fugazi and most recently The Evens. He's also an icon in the straightedge movement and a scion of the world of DIY. His independent record label, Dischord, has run for more than 20 years without contracts. He joined us live on stage in Washington DC at the Bentzen Ball.

The Sound of Young America

A Tale of Two American Economies - Nouriel Roubini

"So, while the United States may technically be close to the end of a severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression. Little wonder, then, that few Americans believe that what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is actually the phoenix of recovery."

- Nouriel Roubini


Read his complete article HERE.

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The NYTs Magazine Profile of "Dr. Doom"

Financial 411: Financial Bloggers Meet With Geithner Over Cookies

"NEW YORK, NY November 16, 2009 —Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sat down with a handful of financial bloggers to talk about the White House's push to change the way the U.S. financial system is regulated. Guests: John Jansen runs the blog, Across the Curve, which is focused on the bond markets. Michael Panzner's book and blog is called Financial Armageddon."

- WNYC, Report by Lisa Chow

This is a very telling, sadly realistic and insightful piece about what The Fed doesn't want to say to the general public nor even have them consider as possible future scenarios.

Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist: Interview on The Sound of Young America

Scott Schuman is the creator of the street fashion photography blog The Sartorialist. His new book collects some of his favorite photos from the blog. His subjects range from Hasidim on the streets of New York to garment industry insiders in Milan.

The Sound of Young America

The Tyranny of E-mail - John Freeman interview on The Leonard Lopate Show

"The average corporate worker receives upwards of two hundred e-mails per day. It’s predicted that by 2011, there will be 3.2 billion e-mail users. John Freeman, one of America's preeminent literary critics and editor of Granta, talks about the nature of correspondence through the ages and looks at the constant flurry of messages that’s currently pursuing us. In The Tyranny of E-mail, he advocates for more personal, nuanced, and sociable communication."

-The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC

Phillies title gear a hit far from World Series

"I just want to make sure someone loses, so others can win," the president of World Vision said.

The leader of the humanitarian group based in the Seattle suburb of Federal Way, was talking over the phone while on a train outside Philadelphia, hours before the Phillies lost Game 6 and the World Series to the New York Yankees late Wednesday night.

Stearns and his organization view the Series and the Super Bowl, for which it also holds a licensed-merchandise agreement with the NFL, in a different way: bring on the losers!

Each fall and winter for the last three years, World Vision has sent to the impoverished around the world thousands of team championship caps, jerseys and T-shirts produced before the World Series and Super Bowl and then rendered unusable for marketing in the United States when teams don't win the title.

Read the complete AP article by Gregg Bell HERE.

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And a great supplementary article to consider by Sam Donnellon of the Philadelphia Daily News: Yankees vs. Phillies: More than just the money

Contemporary Art Photographers Mess With the Medium

Walead Beshty. Three Color Curl

Anxiety? Fetish? Picture-prone artists are loving themselves some process.

By Martha Schwendener

"The question of why certain practices thrive at particular moments feels like the art world equivalent of asking why honeybee populations have collapsed in the last decades or mussels have started growing in the Hudson. Why, for instance, are contemporary photographers—or, if you like, artists working with photography—obsessed with abstraction, materiality, and process?"

Read the rest of her great article HERE.

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And a great complimentary article by Karen Rosenberg of the NYT HERE.

Wasting Art on the Public? - Edward Winkleman's Rebuttal of J. Jones' Huffy Essay

Jonathan Jones has a point to make in his latest blog post over at the Guardian, but the way he made it was guaranteed to be divisive, essentially arguing that the Tate Modern's latest turbine installation (Miroslaw Balka's "How It Is") is wasted on the public because they're not responding seriously enough to the work to actually get it.

Read the rest of his great post HERE.

Project Censored

"The mission of Project Censored is to teach students and the public about the role of a free press in a free society - and to tell the News That Didn’t Make the News and Why."

-from Project Censored's website

Their Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

• #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
• # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
• # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
• # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
• # 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
• # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
• # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
• # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
• #9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
• # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
• # 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
• # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
• # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
• # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
• # 15 Worldwide Slavery
• # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
• # 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
• # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
• # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
• # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
• # 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
• # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
• # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
• # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
• # 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

Woman's Soviet-Era Tales Enthrall Russian TV Viewers by Anne Garrels

Oleg Ivanovich Borisov and Lilianna Zinoviyevna Lungina during the filming of Pavel Lingun’s film “Luna Park.”

A prime-time documentary gripped Russian television viewers recently. In it, an elderly Jewish woman, Lilianna Zinoviyevna Lungina, tells the story of her life under authoritarian Soviet rule. She and her friends settled into a life of quiet dissent, anonymously helping the families of political prisoners and doing work that didn't compromise their principles.

Click here to listen

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Here is a great Washington Post article first written for the Moscow Times

This American Life - Two Great Shows On Health Care

Two hours total of in depth, ground level reporting by TAL on the state of US health care.

391: More Is Less


"An hour explaining the American health care system, specifically, why it is that costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry.
An hour explaining the American health care system, specifically, why it is that costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry."

-TAL

392: Someone Else's Money

"This week, we bring you a deeper look inside the health insurance industry. The dark side of prescription drug coupons. A story about Pet Health Insurance, which is in its infancy, and how it is changing human behaviors—for example, if you have the pet health insurance, you bring your pet to the vet more often, and the vet makes more money and...well, you can see the parallels. And insurance company jargon, frighteningly decoded."

-TAL