The Joy of Books

After organizing their own bookshelf earlier this year, Sean Ohlenkamp and wife Lisa re-doubled their efforts for Type Books in Toronto. After several sleepless nights of animating with a crew of over 20 people, the Joy of Books was born. Music composed especially for the short by Grayson Matthews. See many more books here.

(viametafilter & colossal)

Guy Laramee

Biblios

GuyLaramee.com

Why Beauty Matters

click image to watch video

Philosopher Roger Scruton presents a provocative essay on the importance of beauty in the arts and in our lives.

In the 20th century, Scruton argues, art, architecture and music turned their backs on beauty, making a cult of ugliness and leading us into a spiritual desert.

Using the thoughts of philosophers from Plato to Kant, and by talking to artists Michael Craig-Martin and Alexander Stoddart, Scruton analyses where art went wrong and presents his own impassioned case for restoring beauty to its traditional position at the centre of our civilisation.

Part of the BBC2 Modern Beauty Season  - link HERE

Click HERE or on the above image to watch video

Teaching Aesthetics to Artists

by Doug Arrell

Artists tend to be repelled by aesthetics, for a number of reasons. Many are suspicious that too much analyzing of their art will harm their creativity; it will encourage them to develop their rational ego at the expense of their creative unconscious. Or they suspect that aesthetic analysis will have no effect on them, that thinking about art in this way is simply useless. Give a group of artists a copy of the latest issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and their response is likely to be that it simply doesn’t interest them, that the issues discussed are not ones that they face as artists, and that it seems to consist mainly of academic nit-picking and hair-splitting which has little to do with the real worlds of art.

Find the whole article HERE on the America Society for Aesthetics website

A Rare Look at Corbis’ Massive Underground Photo Storage Facility

Former limestone mine in Pennsylvania is home to 15 million images, including some of the worlds most iconic.

         BY KATHLEEN DAVIS ON DECEMBER 9, 2011 - www.popphoto.com

The most secure backup drive can’t touch the climate and humidity controlled film preservation facility of the image licensing and right services company, Corbis. Located 220 feet underground in part of a 150 acre former  limestone mine in Iron Mountain, PA, the facility is home to 15 million original negatives and  prints of some of the world’s most iconic photos, dating back to the civil war.

Many of the images have been scanned and are available digitally, but as the video from CBS shows, a look inside shows that some of the originals of the most iconic image have been severely damaged from their years before entering the cold storage.

Corbis Chief Historian and Archivist, Ken Johnston, revels that around 99% of the images are credited to anonymous photographers.  He values what some many consider the outtakes, pointing to an image from the Vietnam War of children running from napalm that was taken for a different angle than the Pulitzer-winning image that reveals a crowd of calm photojournalists. As he points out, in our digital age, there is nothing that can match the original film where the photographer couldn’t make editorial decision in-camera.

**Find the whole article HERE

 

Jerry Saltz

The Long Slide: Museums as playgrounds

J’accuse museums of bullshit! Of ­bogusly turning themselves into smash-hit consumer circuses, box-office sensations of voyeurism and hipster showbiz. This year, the institution-­critiquing art known as Relational Aesthetics—essentially audience-participation art, often work that moves, lights up, or involves living nude beings—entered its decadent phase. Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise—all are now the norm, often edging out much else.

This is an excerpt from a very interesting article on the New York Magazine website. The whole article can be found HERE

Melissa McMahon

Beauty: Machinic repetition in the age of art. 

I wait for the ‘best’ moment. Yes, I say to myself, there will come a moment when I will be able to gather my forces, have a vision of the Whole, and from this place and this time emerge The Act. Every day I wait. I try to egg it on with cigarettes and coffee, or by not smoking and not drinking coffee. I’m waiting for my freedom, waiting for all the conditions to come together that will make possible what I want to do. Time passes. A lot of time passes. I;m waiting for it to stop, for it to gather itself into an image, of myself, of my life, of the world. I’m waiting for the movement to stop and reflect itself back to itself – reflection is the condition of action, isn’t it?  But it turns its face away, dissolves into a hundred tiny details, pure moving mass. It is true that in trying all of these postures, I might just crack the code, it might all ‘come together’. But it is undeniable that this moment will not have been one of discovery but of invention.

 

in Brian Massumi’s A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari,2002. pg 3-8

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”

— Oscar Wilde

40 Inspiring Quotes About Reading From Writers  from Flavorwire

Historical Amnesias: An Interview with Paul Connerton

David Bunn, Forgetfulness (discarded catalogue card from the Los Angeles Central Library), 2011.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This perspective—one that bears the marks of life under a totalitarian regime in which repression often took the form of enforced forgetting—assumes that remembering is always a virtue and that not doing so is necessarily a failing. But despite dominating much of the debate on cultural memory, this perspective elides the many differences between all the various acts that we cluster under the term “forgetting.” Are all acts of forgetting similar enough that we can think of them, always and necessarily, as a failure? Can forgetting in fact even be a virtue? And how do we understand the relationship between what needs to be forgotten in order for other things to be remembered?

Paul Connerton, a scholar in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, has addressed these issues in a number of books, including How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1989) andHow Modernity Forgets (Cambridge University Press, 2009). In his 2008 essay “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Connerton offers a preliminary taxonomy of forgetting, and of its various functions, values, and agents: repressive erasure; prescriptive forgetting; forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity; structural amnesia; forgetting as annulment; forgetting as planned obsolescence; and forgetting as humiliated silence. Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi spoke to Connerton by phone.

This interview is from Cabinet Magazine you can read it HERE

HERE is an article on David Bunn