“the relentless glossiness of contemporary visualisation makes us wonder whether there is an ‘uncanny valley’ for buildings”
– things magazine on architecture and gaming engines
I would ascribe the uneasiness to the different purposes and agendas of architects, developers (real estate, not game), gamers, and critics. Has anyone made a FPS map of Gehry’s Peter Lewis Building at Case Western yet?
previously: SWAT team blames Gehry architecture for delay in trapping Cleveland shooter
Gawker Does Not Make $51 Million/Year
People, please.
So with 30 million page views x 4 units x $30/page ratecard, Gawker Media’s annual ad inventory is priced at $52 million retail.
How much inventory do they sell? 50%? 70%? 40%?
Every time you see a Gawker t-shirt button or a Gawker Artists or a Jalopnik banner, it’s an impression that didn’t sell. How often and when does that happen to you on a GM site?
Consumerist’s editors recently bragged that no one’s ever bought an ad on the site, which turned out to be essentially true.
So for the network as a whole, let’s say it’s 60%. MSRP: $31 million/yr.
A 15% discount for walking in the door: $26 million.
Discounts for buying up the entire page [i.e., the 3 biggest units, leaving the 4th button empty]: 20%? I don’t know. Say it happens half the time, so 10%. $23.4 million.
Do these ads sell themselves? 15% commission, not including the tab at Balthazar: $20 million.
Is $1.5mm/month possible? Sure, why not?
But making $20 million while paying people $3000/month? Less than the chick at the Uniqlo store? Less than Chris Evans pays to have his backyard cleared? I doubt it. Gawker ain’t no…damn, what was the name of Calacanis’s blogging sweatshop again? I can’t even remember. WIN something? Never mind.
A job at Gawker is a regular media job at a regular media company. Far be it from me to grope in the dark and overestimate the size of Denton’s nut, but he’s gotta be spending $5-6 mm a year.
Nick’s right. When done professionally, blogging turns out to be a profitable, efficient media publishing platform, but Gawker is not clearing $51 million/year. You should still totally let him pick up the tab at Balthazar, though. And the real reason they keep hounding that Ferrari douchebag on Crosby street is because he’s parking in Denton’s AMG-spot.
“Thanks For All The Memories/ Alright, Let’s See Your Arm”
Seeing William Burrough’s old Nike commercial reminded me of Burroughs’ 1996 music video Thanksgiving Prayer, directed by Gus Van Sant. Classic stuff.
Love And Music
I’ve been working with a recent episode of WNYC’s Radiolab on in the background. The subject is memory, which also happens to be the subject of my series of short films, The Souvenir Series.
There was a typical brainy [sic] science segment on how memories are created–and blocked–in the brain, then a kind of random story about Joe Andoe’s paintings. The possibility that memory is metaphorically more like creating a work of art than filing a piece of data away is interesting, maybe even persuasive, though our metaphors usually turn out to be more revealing of us at a particular moment in our culture than accurately illuminating of what’s actually going on.
But it was the last story, about Clive and Deborah Wearing and an overwhelming amnesia that just stopped me cold. It started out as one more Oliver Sacks bauble before taking a remarkably poignant turn. Just listen to it, I can’t tell you how it goes.
Radiolab Show #304: Memory and Forgetting [wnyc.org]
Remembering Perv
So for 15/20ths of my time on the elliptical machine yesterday, CNN was, in their words, “Remembering Merv”, all while apparently forgetting his sexual harassment and palimony suits or his closeted, right-wing conservative support of Reagan and his sudden lack of gabbiness when the subject of the then-emerging AIDS epidemic.
Then in the car home, the second story on NPR–after the Tragic Loss of Merv–was one CNN didn’t even put in the crawl. It was a quote from the US’s Important Ally in the War Against Terror, Pervez Musharaff, who acknowledged that the Taliban was getting support from Pakistan’s tribal areas. And then he made all sorts of conciliatory, friendly remarks about helping them out, and bringing their well-meaning constituents to the table.
Seriously. All we need now is to worry a bit more about Lizzie Grubman’s driving and the whereabouts of Chandra Levy, and we’re set.
Philipp Otto Runge’s Farbenkugel
In 1810, the last year of his young life, painter Philipp Otto Runge devised his Color Sphere, one of the first attempts to depict a comprehensive color system in three dimensions. Runge was a correspondent of Goethe, who was also interested in color theory.
The image above is from Runge’s book, Farbenkugel. It comes from Echo Systems’ Virtual Colour Museum, which was the source for BibliOdyssey’s collection of beautiful images of color systems dating back to Pythagoras.
The History of Colour Systems [BibliOdyssey]
Ten Top Ten Lists Of Video/Films For The 21st Century
The Japanese magazine Art-iT asked ten artists, directors, curators and i-don’t-knows for their top ten “‘artistic’ films of the 21st century”. I was glad but just a little surprised to see Jeremy Blake’s Sodium Fox, which I don’t think was as good as Winchester.
And I was pleased to see Takehito Koganezawa, whose Untitled (Neon) plays like a documentary Jeremy Blake. I’m surprised that no one put Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet on a list, but not as surprised as I was that they put anything of Bill Viola’s. Ugh. But the most 21st century list of all is probably Ukawa’s, because as you know, if it’s not on YouTube these days, it doesn’t exist.
The Listmakers:
Kataoka Mami
Kurosawa Kiyoshi
Barbara London
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Johan Pijnappel
Sawa Hiraki
Mike Stubbs
Ukawa Naohiro
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Elga Wimmer
10×10 “artistic” films of the 21st century [art-it.jp via jeansnow.net]
That Was Way Harsh, Times
From the NYT review of Bratz: The Movie:
With their tender hearts and lip-gloss dreams, these teenage princesses are direct descendants of Alicia Silverstone’s Cher in “Clueless,” although Sean McNamara’s TV-ready framing and coarse direction lack Amy Heckerling’s snap and style.
As if. Clueless was like the greatest Jane Austen adaptation Hollywood’s ever done. Bratz are a line of skank dolls for whorish toddlers with–oh. Clueless parents.
Profit And/From Pain
Charles Thomas Samuels [“S”] interviewed Michelangelo Antonioni [“A”] in Rome in 1969. I finally figured out the occasional non-sequiturish statements in the transcript were originally photo captions.
S: In an interview I had with him, John Updike said something that fascinated me: “Being an artist is dangerous because it allows one to turn one’s pain too quickly to profit.”
A: I couldn’t use that phrase today-“being an artist”-as if that were something exceptional. And if somebody transmutes his pain into profit, very good. I find that the most wonderful way to kill pain.
S: Why do you say “today”? Could you have used the phrase “being an artist” in some other period?
A: Yes, of course. I think that during the Renaissance everything was influenced by art. Now the world is so much more important than art that I can no longer imagine a future artistic function.
S: But today what is the function?
A: I don’t know.
S: You don’t know?
A: Do you?
S: Yes.
A: Then tell me.
S: You want me to tell you what the function of art is! No, you tell me what you think of Francois Truffaut.
A: I think his films are like a river, lovely to see, to bathe in, extraordinarily refreshing and pleasant. Then the water flows and is gone. Very little of the pleasant feeling remains because I soon feel dirty again and need another bath.
Interview with Michelangelo Antonioni in Rome, July 29, 1969
by Charles Thomas Samuels [zakka.dk via greencine]
The Grey Album Of Decorating, May She Live To Be 150
“Oatsie Charles had John Peixinho recover her late husband’s Barcalounger in printed linen.”
“Shanghai” from Scalamandre, as it turns out. Updating Newport, Ever So Slightly [nyt]
You Stay Classy, Bruce Ratner
In less than thirty seconds, I could rattle off a dozen people in the real estate business, and another easy dozen in the video and film business, and a dozen in the finance business, who have incredibly, admirably, even enviably sophisticated views of art and the art world.
And yet, in two short emailed paragraphs, a hapless Atlantic Yard minion resets the real estate and banking cultural clocks to zero:
Hi, I’m working on an in house promotional video for Frank Gehry and the Atlantic Yards Project. We will be taping in Williamsburg this Thursday or Friday and are interested in videoing an artist in his or her work space. The work should be large and colorful and the space should be interesting, windows or some nice architecture. It should also be at least 700 to 1000 square feet or bigger.
This video will be shown to investors and could be an opportunity to highlight the artists work. We will have a small crew of about 8 people and shouldn’t be there longer than an hour or two. We can give the artist a nominal fee of 250.00 as we have no location budget.
I don’t know what giant, controversial idea lurking beneath which blithely unaware comment is more entertaining to contemplate:
You stay classy, too, Frank.
Calling All ‘Burg Artists: Want to Sell Out for Atlantic Yards? [curbed]
If I Were Jean-Luc Godard, I’d Stop Jaywalking, Pronto
today: Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, Italian Director, Dies [ap/nyt]
yesterday: Ingmar Bergman, Master Filmmaker, Dies at 89 [nyt]
Artnet: Cultural Learnings For Make Benefit Glorious Art World
Quadriceptica II is an amazing exhibition of which the Cultural Directorate of Rjamusz can be justly proud, and to which anyone seriously interested in pan-national trends in current post-market cultural production must direct themselves before the onset of locust season.
The first question to be asked is immediately answered on page 857 of the multilingual (English, French, German, Italian, Greek, Latin and Mandarin) catalogue. Quadriceptica II is being held now instead of next year (2008) because of the insight of Walter Zor, who is the President of Quadriceptica, LLC, as well as executive director of the Rjamuszan Cultural Directorate and Mayor of Belikk. As he told those of us who attended the gala press preview on the scenic rocky beach just a few kilometers’ vigorous and refreshing walk from Olde Belikk, he had been reading in the international media about America’s presidential primaries campaign, and about how each state seemed to be moving its primary to an earlier and earlier date in order to, as Mr. Roz [sic] put it in a typically Rjamuszan way, “get a jump on the competition.” Quadriceptica II thus makes an intervention in the current discourse at least six months ahead of any of the 2008 polyennials.
Lisa Evelyn-Radish’s parody on artnet of the proliferation of biennials would be a heckuvalot funnier if it weren’t indistinguishable from the actual, sycophantic drive-by travelogues the site’s been running for reals.
Here’s Emma Gray fluffing some local friends and sources in LA–and auditioning to do some personal art shopping for the recently arrived Beckhams [“Hey! You’re from England? I’m from England! We should hang out, my friend has a gallery…”]:
On the media front in Los Angeles, changes are afoot. Angeleno magazine has a new editor-in-chief, Degen Pener, and for his suite of city pubs (under the Modern Luxury moniker) is presenting an article about the young movers and shakers of the Los Angeles art scene. And art PR guru Bettina Korek is working with Ovation TV on a documentary titled Art or Not, featuring a range of artists from Shepherd Fairey to Erik Parker, with commentary from yours truly.
Finally, to bring things full circle — some more artwork for the Beckhams’ pad that puts the capital “B” back in bling. At “Ultrasonic International,” the current group show at Mark Moore Gallery in Bergamot station, July 14-Aug. 25, 2007, an untitled work by the UK-based artist Susan Collis consists of nothing but a pair of screws that stand out proudly in the wall, upon which a painting or other work of art may be hung. The ruse is that these two screws are the art itself. Manufactured in white gold with diamonds in the center, they sell for $3,600 — and are cheap at the price!
Baffled at Gray’s logrolling, Tyler had wondered yesterday if artnet had any editors. I think the problem with artnet’s suck-uppery is that they do. Here’s Walter Robinson reporting on a collaboration between the artists Takashi Murakami and Kanye West:
Though he’s living the life of a Grammy-winning hip-hop star, West seems to have a real admiration for Murakami’s lifestyle, describing him as “a god in the art world.” During a recent tour of Japan, West visited the artist’s Kaikai Kiki studio and took his own souvenir snapshots of Hiropon, Murakami’s life-sized sculpture of a bosomy anime pinup. The two men had their photo taken posing in front of the work, an image that is part of an illustrated report by Akiko Kato on the Kaikai Kiki website.
…
During his stop at the studio, West showed off a diamond-encrusted crucifix that he had designed himself — “Breathtaking,” wrote Kato, “Christ’s eyes shined blue” — and then went on to sketch an idea for another amulet design. West asked Murakami to add eyes to the drawing, and “an unexpected collaboration was born!” The sketch was clearly the inspiration for the neon creature from Murakami’s Can’t Tell Me Nothing cover, and the necklace West wears in the Can’t Tell Me Nothing video looks like the Kaikai Kiki drawing.
“We think that he [West] and Takashi share this eerie ability to concentrate and approach everything with utmost seriousness,” Kato concludes. The report also hints at another common interest between the two superstars — Louis Vuitton, whose brand Murakami famously revitalized several years ago. West entered Murakami’s studio wearing a colored Vuitton pouch. Both of the rapper’s new singles refer to the luxury handbag maker (Can’t Tell Me Nothing includes the words “And what’d I do? Act more stupidly/Bought more jewelry, more Louis V;” and Stronger includes the lyric “I’m caught up in the moment, right?/This is Louis Vuitton dime night.”)
Sounds like that Kaikai Kiki junket Robinson took to Tokyo last fall is still paying off in cuddly reportage:
The point is, I am a sucker for this collaborative stuff. So Geisai #10 was an easy sale to me. A one-day art fair for art students and young artists, open to all comers, Geisai #10 was organized by art superstar Takashi Murakami in Tokyo on Sept. 17, 2006. About 800 young Japanese artists packed into a big hall at the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition center. The price of a booth started at about $210, for which you got no walls and no electricity — thus, there were aisles full of young people sitting on the floor, surrounded by their works, most of them as cute as can be.
It was great.
Murakami’s art production company, Kaikai Kiki, flew me over to Tokyo from New York for the weekend, along with a handful of other western art critics, putting us up in a fancy downtown hotel that had the sleek glass and stone design of a corporate skyscraper. They ushered us around in vans and fed us at fancy restaurants.
I had been petrified at the thought of taking the 12-hour trip in coach, so I finally figured out how to turn all those unused frequent-flier miles I had into an upgrade to business class, where the seats are like the recliner chair my dad used to have in our family room. This — eating, sleeping, watching TV — I could handle any time. Like I said, it was great.
It turns out that Murakami is way more than Japan’s answer to Walt Disney…
It’s hard to tell where the parody stops.
HowTo Photoset: Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull
Alright, I will grant that a 54-carat, flawless pink diamond would push the fabrication cost of an 1,100-carat pave’ and platinum skull beyond the $3-4 million I was able to account for.
Still, it’s worth noting that the whisper number for Damien Hirst’s outlay has crept up as well. When his skull went on display, it was $20 million, then it became an unknown amount, was it 10 or 12 million pounds? Now it’s reported as $28 million. Uh-huh.
Anyway, flickr user Red Clover Pix has a set of photos from the construction of the skull. Remarkably, the photos appear to have been on flickr for almost two months, and yet they’ve received only a few dozen views. Were they only made public now?
Red Clover Pix: Damien Hirst’s Skull [flickr via supertouchblog via notcot]
Previously: Diamonds Are Forever! TODAY ONLY!! The Costing Of Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull
Birth Of A Steadicam-on-Segway Nation
Historians of the moving image take note:
The first commercial footage shot with the Handsfree-Transporter Cam Transport, wherein a Steadicam operator steers a modified Segway with his crotch, was a moving [sic] performance of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” by a Dutch marching band at the 2006 Nationale Taptoe in S’Hertogenbosch.
For aspiring Cam Transport users, the bar has been set very high indeed.
Meanwhile, I hope the second shoot will be at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center; those fellas need some help with their camerawork pronto.
Handsfree-Transporter.com > Cam Transport > Videos [handsfree-transporter.com via coudal]