A perk of working late tonight at Lincoln Center: GIFing the fabulous view from my bosses’ office
claire.mazur@gmail.com

Untitled by Claire Mazur is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
A perk of working late tonight at Lincoln Center: GIFing the fabulous view from my bosses’ office
In One Ear, Out the Other by San Francisco-based painter Jessica Snow.
Ever since Jen Bekman & co. have stepped up their Tumblr activity, it’s taken so much self control not to just buy up everything. My tumblr dashboard has become a constant reminder of all the prints that I love and want and they’re so affordable and so easy to purchase, I really have to go to battle with myself and remind me that $20 adds up after awhile and there’s only so much space on my walls.
I am the proud owner of the colorful piece shown above by Jessica Snow—it’s hanging in my living room next to another 20x200 edition:
Space and Illusion by Carrie Marill

6/6 parts of a French documentary on Judith Butler on YouTube. If, like me, you’ve forgotten all of your college French, don’t worry, it’s mostly Judy talking in her native tongue with Francais subtitles. Or is it Francaise subtitles? There is a JB gender joke in there somewhere. I can’t tell you how uncomfortable and embarrassed I got around the 5:50 mark. Also, I am going to be up all night watching this now.
i didnt think i could love judith butler any more, but now that i know she is a jew from cleveland, which is kind of like being a jew from buffalo, i feel even more bonded than i did when i wrote my gender-trouble-heavy thesis in 1997.
so thanks to ada for finding this. my favorite part is when she says, “ive never found a place I don’t think ill ever find a place. if my thinking about this is productive at all…it is because I am always slightly disidentified from any given position. i don’t belong in any established category. but im not someone who happily transcends them all. im not in favor of happy transcendence.”
i also like it when she says that the berkeley kids celebrating no pants day are “not so revolutionary.” so true.
This whole move (and the attendant hubbub) is sort of not so different from when Rocco Landesman was appointed the chairman of the NEA, right?
At some point this blog was in danger of becoming a Sea of Shoes fanblog, and, once alerted to the fact, I attempted to correct for it. Now it’s in danger of becoming a Luxirare fanblog, but I can’t stop. I need to tell you that I was wrong about what I said before, about Luxirare being about fashion and food. Because now it’s also about crayons.
Beautiful photos and semi-followable tutorial on making edible (and working!) crayons.
To decorate, you can also use Edible gold leaf. This is more expensive than the gold dust. Whichever is fine.
—


I don’t even know what to do with this girl and her blog (via Jane Aldridge, of course). So many questions! Who is she? Where does she get the resources? I keep finding myself drawn to these really obsessive, precise artists like her; it’s one of the things that made that Saatchi Gallery show of new art from China so good. I find it sort of hilarious but endearing that she treats it almost as if it were a DIY instructional blog, like the typical reader might be trying to mimic these absurd masterpieces on their day off. This is not so much a food blog or fashion blog as it is art, presented in the format of a blog. Art that centers on food and fashion. But, whatever. This is the type of thing that will eventually replace fashion magazines, right? Please let this be the type of thing that will eventually replace fashion magazines. For a fun time, check out her fresh mozzarella video.
This story just walloped my heart in a matter of six pages. Someone should make a short film out of it. Someone who wants to make people cry.
…And then there’s this:
NEA report shows declining attendance in arts events nationwide
also, re: movie ticket prices being less than museum entry prices: someone please tell NY museums about this novel idea
It may be because of the relative bargain of a museum ticket, an increased popular interest in contemporary art, or just a rainy summer, but admissions at the majority of art museums in the US have been holding steady through the recession—and many are dramatically on the rise. A survey by The Art Newspaper of 20 museums across the country found that two-thirds have experienced a clear increase in visitor numbers over the past three years.
The trend holds for institutions with free and paid admissions alike, and institutions that show contemporary art have seen the most clear-cut increase. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), one of the nation’s most expensive museums at $20 per ticket, had the best year in its 80-year history, bringing in 2.8 million visitors between 2008 and 2009. The size of its membership rose to a record 120,000. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective was its best-attended show yet, attracting 372,000 people. The New York museum has also broken its 2008 attendance record of just over one million.
I’m not surprised by this, museum tickets are often less than a movie ticket and popcorn and can be much more stimulating, but this is exciting news isn’t it? People spending their money on more “quality”* experiences, where one could go off in solitude and think or with friends and start lively discussions about what they are experiencing, is a lovely trend.
*Just my opinion.
does this work speak to you, tess?
I was in a rare mood just now. You know: blood sugar; all food is unattractive; you can’t find your handful of quarters for the meters; there is a DirecTV van in the parking spot you use in front of your house; you get a losing lottery ticket; you receive an email for an event and you’re, like, personally offended that you are getting spammed. The last one was particularly aggravating since today I received at least seventy five percent bad email.
The power of email has not yet been described accurately by media. Do we even know how to characterize our relationship to email? Unlike the phone, which delivers its messages less frequently and almost always to just you, personally, emails are constantly hitting you with information: general, trivial, unpleasant, funny (usually not). You get news, bills, forwards, spam, spam poetry, gossip (general), gossip (personal). Important stuff, less-important-than-dust stuff. It’s so stressful to sort through it sometimes. Often it feels like it is totally without reward. When you eliminate the spam with a spam folder, and then gradually decide that almost everything not to you personally from a human being should go in the spam folder as well, do you miss it? You still have to check it all the time. I go back and forth: sometimes I check my phone and see that there is a sale on lobster at Legal Seafoods online. I put it in spam. Then months later I look in my spam and I think, oh, how sad. I do like Legal Seafoods.
Since email is often boring, undramatic to portray in art (a person staring into a computer. When will this ever convey the drama that happens here in life? When will I watch a movie and see someone check an email and care? It has not happened yet for me, even though it has for many of my favorite critics), and constantly gettin’ at you, it doesn’t have that punch-to-the-gut as a phone call would. Information over the phone gives you the opportunity to emote right back. There is no time to think! Feelings are in real time. With email, the delay takes the buzz away from your reaction, and the feeling of always having to get back to someone about something from days ago is oppressive. It’s a numb, dreary sensation, getting back to the emails.
At the same time, I hate talking on the phone and it’s great to be able to muse on this or that, when emailing, and think “this person will read this at their leisure. If they have nothing to say right now, they’ll say something later.” It’s nice to send an email, isn’t it? Ahhh. You can take your time with it, too. You can use a complicated metaphor and go back and delete it and nobody will ever know. Best of all, you’ve had a quiet conversation with yourself, essentially. You took a monologue. Even a small email is perfectly encapsulated because it’s an entire thought surrounded by silence. It requires full attention to understand. You can also smoke, or eat a burger, or sit in your underpants as you converse via email — nobody can hear you chew, or interrupt you to say, “Are you in your underpants? I got that feeling. Like you were.”
In a perfect world, people would have no jobs other than to respond promptly and emotionally to their emails. Every single one. Spam would be sent by people who would read these responses and be affected by them. Our movies would change: every relationship would have an email component, and when people sat down at the computer, you would expect a real shitstorm, with crying. Our novels would have big chunks of email exchanges, bam-bam-bam, back and forth, and it wouldn’t be clunky and ruin the book for me, it would be well-executed and make sense and be tense and exciting. Either our whole email system has to change, or our art can never reference emails, ever again. This is the rule I’m making right now.
Congratulations, Ms. Bekman & co! Very inspiring.
Combating Sex Trafficking, With Or Without Ashton Kutcher’s Help - Top - Jezebel
Friend and colleague Alissa Moore is profiled in Jezebel! I’m so proud of her and the ridiculous amount of energy and commitment she maintains.
Lawrence Weiner, AT THE SAME MOMENT, 2009
(also part of PLOT/09: This World and Nearer Ones)
Anthony McCall, Between You and I, 2009