— On International Art English, by Alix Rule and David Levine. The Null Device

I am truly sick of reading or watching stuff made by wannabe sophisticates acting as if they invented the wheel, when in fact are just repackaging and reframing stuff made not much long ago by a not-dissimilar sort of people. The materialization of abstract concepts is to be expected then, as plagiarized works are to be seen as new by the inclusion of these invisible new raw materials. In this context, Art English is just a tiresome, predictable symptom of the fact that art the ‘creative industries’ are all just about posing an attitude and about packaging irrelevancies in a way that conveys a feeling of being a (take your pick:) sophisticated / interesting / mysterious / fabulous person, and not about making art at all, not about communication at all, not about sharing and empathizing with other humans at all.

Not even about just showing something cool.

I feel more and more that, in the same way as all professional sports tend to become like Wrestling, so does Contemporary Art constantly tends to become Advertising (of itself and of the artist) and a sad affirmation of exclusivity. Not that this is, mind you, a new critique, people have been making the same sort of point since before Pop Art opened the floodgates of artistic capitalism. And therein, perhaps, lies the root problem. Just say no!

— Tim Kreidler on The ‘Busy’ Trap. If you haven’t read this article yet you should, right now. You really have the time.

— Harry Truman, a United States president, said that. Now it seems everybody is after getting credit, patents, intellectual property: such greed, not ‘fiscal insolvency’ will be the undoing of Western civilization, much like the authoritarian fear of photocopiers left Soviet science irreversibly behind and was one of the factors leading to its demise. (Rules for my Unborn Son gets the credit)

— John Perry’s How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done looks like a good article on the ‘active procrastination’ I wrote about yesterday. True to form, I’ll read it later.

— Robert Anton Wilson. Boing Boing

— Jason Sweeney. Bravo!

— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. And I try, I really do!

— Drake on Tumblr — Ruby Pseudo Wants a Word. The New Aesthetic

Agreed. But still, Tumblr allows users to post original content, and even backpedalled on that ill-advised Tumblarity experiment (a popularity contest won by whoever ‘liked’ and ‘reblogged’ the most). I’d love to know Drake’s thoughts on Stellar (previously), which is all ‘likes’ and ‘re-likes’. Stellar may be pretty cool at this point in which it is inhabited by a small number of early adopters — mostly adults who ‘fave’ interesting stuff (or should we use the big word ‘curate’?) —, but what happens when the Tumblr-teens get their accounts there and are exposed to an interface in which writing or uploading something new is not even an option?

— A teacher’s farewell letter to his students. Worth reading as a new academic year begins.

— Slavoj Žižek: Shoplifters of the World Unite

Still on the subject of last month’s London riots (and beyond), Slavoj Zizek bests my ability to articulate a few (hopefully) nuanced thoughs. His indictment is complete: conservatives blind to the fact the riots were themselves a conservative outburst, leftists too vain to recognize impotence and too eager to opt in on to any popular outbursts without discrimination; and a particular insight about both sides’ lack of ‘world’, which I read as the refusal to acknowledge nuance, complexity, and the staggering fact that there are seven thousand million people around. Perhaps an good example of this — and as picking on the right-wing would be too easy — is the typical leftist blind and uncompromising refusal of nuclear energy, as if the option was between nuclear and nothing — it is obviously, a complex choice between nuclear and other equally harmful sources, as even a similar megawattage of ‘sustainable’ sources such as wind or solar is arguably ecologically harmful (and even if people in their little community believe they need no such amounts of energy, perhaps their 7000 million meat-eating, Benz-craving neighbours disagree, and what to do then?).

Again, a very recommended and uncompromising read.