i dont want to make tricks to reach out and touch somebody. its not hard, but it's hard to do right. don't hurt anybody.

Superstition in Pigeons

ttp://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Pigeon/

interesting article on how Pigeons developed superstitious responses to random stimulus. So if they were given food at the touch of a button, then given food randomly, they would try to replicate whatever they were doing at the moment they were given food, in order to be given more!

Goyte- Thanks for your time

Goodnight Ladies meets Fred Astaire

I don't even know how to describe this. Beautiful dance sequence, but the wrongness and the rightness of it... oh!

Matthew Barney, wide neck crewneck

Just the title and appropriated images are powerful enough.

Levi van Veluw- bedroom

These installations are inspired by different aspects of van Veluw's boyhood bedroom, where he spent many solitary hours between the ages of 8 and 14: the Origin of the Beginning.
Not sure how much I like the outcome but I appreciate the idea. You do become very preoccupied with the surface of things because there are a limited amount of things to look at in one room.

From Andre Gide's Journals

25 July 

When desire subsides so does my whole being. 

When beauty no longer excites in us any need of approach, of 
contact, and of embracing, the state of calm that you were fool enough 
to long for at a time when an excess of desires tormented you, that 
state no longer seems to you anything but apathy and deserves to be 
praised only because, perhaps, it makes the idea of death less atro- 
cious, by taming you to it. 

found here 

Keith Haring

http://keithharing.tumblr.com/ they are publishing one page of his artistic journals/sketchbooks for every day of a current exhibition. It's good to read them when you want to remember all 'artists' have the same doubts, concerns etc, and he always manages to get back to the bigger picture within a page. Also, nice to see so much writing. I sympathise.

James Nizam

Really feeling this guy.
James Nizam is making incredible work based in Vancouver. These pieces are about abandoned houses, of which apparently there are a lot where he comes from. He seeks them out, and precisely cuts into them, transforming them into works of art.

Sometimes he uses mirrors to acquire geometric shapes.

 He uses fog to enhance the living, present nature of the light. I like how he's found the location, taken a deserted, abandoned, disused and 'ugly' thing and altered it so simply into something beautiful. The works exist as photographs which I actually find quite strange. I suppose, he can't exhibit an abandoned house, or keep the smoke machine going forever. But I guess the photographs serve still as reminders that somewhere out there, this exists or existed. I simply can't see the photographs as the final piece here.

Art Jokes

"Getting" art is like getting a joke because art is jokes now. When you're telling a joke and nobody laughs, that's because your joke wasn't funny. Or maybe it was funny but then you fucked it up, which is not the point because the same thing happened: no laughing. When that happens it's never because people didn't "get" it.

A lot of jokes these days are "can you believe it?'s", which are sometimes not that funny, because what if you can believe it? Also it's like that thing where the joke isn't funny because the person is trying too hard to make you laugh and you're like "why don't you just fucking relax?" instead of laughing at your own joke to make me do it too. (I do this sometimes.)

And that's my new dissertation. I call it "art jokes."