Sitting on flower with blue fairy dust.
Cute idea on woman's back.
Fabulous bright colors with name underneath.
Cute artwork with bellybutton piercing.
(161) Guillaume Herbaut ~ 'Beautiful isn't enough' . . . an Albanian woman
Glenn Beck ~ Both Portraits
Karl Rove, Republican National Convention, NY,ON THE AIR and in person, Beck often goes on long stretches that are warm, conciliatory and even plaintive. He says he yearns for the cohesion in the country after Sept. 11, 2001, and will speak in paragraphs that could fit into Barack Obama’s plea for national unity in his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “There’s a lot we can disagree on, but our values and principles can unite us,” Beck said from the Lincoln Memorial.
But “standing together” can be a tough sell from someone who is so willing to pick at some of the nation’s most tender scabs. Beck’s statement that the president’s legislative agenda is driven by Obama’s desire for “reparations” and his “desire to settle old racial scores” is hardly a uniting message. While public figures tend to eventually learn (some the hard way) that Nazi, Hitler and Holocaust comparisons inevitably offend a lot of people, Beck seems not to care. In a forthcoming book about Beck, “Tears of a Clown,” the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes that in the first 14 months of Beck’s Fox News show, Beck and his guests mentioned fascism 172 times, Nazis 134 times, Hitler 115 times, the Holocaust 58 times and Joseph Goebbels 8 times.
In his quest to root out progressives, Beck compared himself to Israeli Nazi-hunters. “To the day I die I am going to be a progressive-hunter,” he vowed on his radio show earlier this year. “I’m going to find these people that have done this to our country and expose them. I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes.”
“Raising questions” is Beck’s favorite rhetorical method. Last year during the health care debate, Beck compared Obama’s economic agenda to Nazi Germany — specifically he paralleled the White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s statement that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” with how Hitler used the world economic crisis as a pivot point. Photos of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin then appeared on screen. “Is this where we’re headed?” Beck asked. He allowed that “I am not predicting that we go down that road.”
If you treat people as Nazis, then you hound them like criminals and dismiss (or worse, eliminate) them rather than, say, addressing them as a interlocutors to be taken seriously enough to disagree with. That's Glenn Beck, Nazi hunter.
3D style bursting through shoulder.
Nice cartoon style idea.
Comic book style tattoo idea.
Old school art in post transformation.
"Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them.Those are some of the entertaining bits from this report by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. Taibbi gets bogged down in the duplicity of Rand Paul and trades is some unfortunate analogies: "Tea Partiers . . . really don't pay attention to specifics too much. Like dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude." After all, if we call it insulting and degrading when right wing wackos compare people to animals, it hardly is excusable to turn around and dehumanize the wackos. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy. And it is not useful.
[. . .]The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me — I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from [Dick] Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.") Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are."
The bad news is that the Tea Party's political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That's the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It's just that it's a lot of noise, and there's no telling when it's ever going to end.If the deck is as stacked as all that why write critical political analysis - or argue back with tea party types - in the first place?
Artist’s Statement: In his own words. … Alfredo Jaar talks about his installation The Marx Lounge, a neon lit reading room devoted to left wing theory. His piece is a public realm commission for Liverpool Biennial 2010: Touched, the International Exhibition. (here)Well, I've been a great reader of this kind of literature for many years and I really think there has been a kind of revolution going on in the last 20, 30 years in the intellectual world.As a political theorist I find Jaar's work wonderfully provocative and his taste in "theory" unfortunate. Many (not all) of the writers he mentions are virtually impenetrable [1]. Among the problems with progressive or leftist "theory" is that verbiage takes the place of analysis; not only is there a tendency to be Luddite with respect to the often very useful tools of standard social science, but there is a preoccupation with abstraction and a turning away from genuine political and economic problems.
If you read some of these texts by Stuart Hall, by Terry Eagleton, by Alain Badiou, by Jacques Rancière, Frederic Jameson, etc, etc. They are extraordinary texts and essays. They are very challenging. They are models of thinking the world and that's what I do as an artist. I create models of thinking the world.
So I wanted to share this knowledge with the public because people tend to go very quickly in a biennial. They move from work to work. They are stressed. They are rushed. They want to see everything, and so this is in a way a work that asks you to ‘stop, please stop, stay here, relax, take your time, why don't we think for a while?, let’s go in depth into these subjects.’
I'm an architect making art so basically when I was given the space I wanted to create a comfortable space where people could sit down, enjoy themselves, and have good light to read, be comfortable, to offer them a break in this rush around works. And basically we created the longest possible table to accommodate some 1,500 books.
So the centrepiece is this huge table and of course we made a funny allusion to Marxism and communism with the red walls and the neon sign that says Marx Lounge, and we have the red carpet and we decided on black sofas. So it’s a very striking colour decision. We took red and black. But it's really a comfortable place. It's a place that invites you to sit down and relax and read. It's a reading room.
I wanted people to stop in their tracks, because you can access the internet in your home and on your phones. There is so much technology today, but I think the book has this value of stopping you in your tracks of asking you to go deeper inside. I have the impression that technology keeps us on the surface.
It's very difficult to sit in front of a computer and go deep inside because your eyes get tired very quickly. You have to operate software. You have to operate the mouse, etc, etc. And you are distracted by mail, by different windows opening up and flash movies and things like that. So here it’s really about you and a world construction that is being made in front of your eyes by this author in the book. I wanted to slow down and technology goes too fast. I really wanted to slow down.
Liverpool has a long tradition of progressive politics and historically it's a place where workers have fought for so many rights and so I thought it was the right place to create a work like this.
“A lot of my recent work is to do with seeing as an activity, rather than a passive reception of the world . . . What clues do you need to make sense of something? Things come together and there is an instant when you recognise, oh yes, a rider on a horse. It’s about acknowledging and celebrating that double nature of seeing, the impurity of seeing: I know that it’s pieces of wire and black paper but I can’t stop myself seeing a face.
An abstract painter might insist their work is just paint but I am saying that’s a complete distortion of what it is to be human. It’s not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That’s what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously putting things together, getting shapes to have a coherence. It’s a kind of act of aggression against the self to try to stop that. A sort of Zen purity. I am so against that!”
From a philosophical point of view this claim deflates criticisms of what has been called the spectator theory of knowledge not by rehabilitating a naive view of disengaged viewing but by insisting that spectatorship itself necessarily is an activity.
“For me, the question was: what was the relationship between that energy and inventiveness and the belief in politics by the artist? There was something about the belief in the possibilities of revolution that was part of the energy inside their work.”A well-stated question and the pretty much the only right answer.
“How do you keep a sense of utopian optimism, but at the same time understand the disastrous history of utopias? I don’t pretend to have an answer, but that is the space in which you work.”
Classic portrait with light blue background.
Kenny design idea.
Butters looking awfully scared.
I suppose that it is better to forget your own birthday or anniversary than to forget someone else's. So, that is that. On September 24th - this past Friday - this blog was five years old. Slipped my mind completely. The nice blogger folks tell me that I've written just short of 2500 posts. The various counters I've linked to provide different numbers, but on average they suggest that I've had roughly half a million visitors. Pretty amazing - as I've said before. Thanks everyone, for stopping by! And thanks too to (nearly) everyone who has taken time to comment or has provided suggestions or complained about this and that. Really.
Razón is an international collective of visual storytellers pursuing stories independently, but sharing, inspiring, and motivating each other to seek and convey truths and reasons behind every story to be told.The second of the collectives is called Luceo Images and its six members offer this self-description:
Razón was founded by 5 members scattered throughout the globe, each offering a unique perspective on the events unfolding in their respective regions.
The nucleus of Razón lies in the collective’s collaborative spirit and desire to assist one another, while exploring social issues in a new age of visual storytelling.
Luceo Images is a photographer owned and operated cooperative established with the goal of supporting the significant work of its members. Luceo produces the highest quality commercial and editorial photography and works to provide creative nourishment to our member photographers.I am sure these collectives cannot be unique - there must be other such undertakings.They nevertheless seem to me exemplary of the sort of mutual aid and support that is called for in the face of daunting economic pressures.
Luceo’s six founding members came together during a time of industry transition that has impacted the way that imagery is created, distributed and consumed. We are meeting these challenges with creative ideas that offer solutions to our clients and allow us opportunities to work on projects with purpose.
Luceo believes that photography is about dialogue, discussion and shared ideas. It is with this belief that Luceo reaches out beyond its group to build relationships with other individuals and collectives. Our hope is to build a network of partnerships that allow us opportunities to fulfill our goals and to offer unique products and services to our clients.
FEATURES:
Luceo is united in a common belief that, through these times of change, the still image continues to be relevant. We believe that history extends beyond the news-cycle, and that ordinary people and personal struggle are avenues through which we can explore the bigger issues facing our world. It is with this purpose that we created the Luceo Project Fund and the Luceo Student Project Award.
Project Fund: We believe in actively encouraging the completion of significant personal bodies of work, which lack funding through mainstream outlets. In pursuit of this goal, Luceo contributes a percentage of all editorial and commercial commissions toward the Luceo Project Fund. This fund exists solely to support the long-term projects of Luceo’s member photographers. Every commission allows our clients to support significant photographic work.
Student Project Award: We also believe that developing photographers need support. To advance this cause, Luceo pledges a portion of this fund towards the Luceo Student Project Award. This award is disbursed annually to a talented student photographer in support of a significant and developing body of work.
X-ray with pea size brain.
