Posts tagged Art
Barely anyone knew about Bouvier’s dealings: a handful of gallery owners across Europe, his lawyer, and Sotheby’s private-sales department. His staff at Natural Le Coultre noticed the art works stored on his account but insist that they were never told more. Their boss was rarely in the office; Bouvier travelled constantly, investing. He controls more than forty companies, which cover a bewildering range of interests, from R4, a new complex of galleries on the site of an old Renault factory in Paris, to Smartcopter, an idea for developing a low-cost helicopter. His manner discouraged conversation. Reynard told me that he never inquired where the money for the Singapore Freeport was coming from. “It is a question you don’t ask,” he told me. “Because you know that he will not answer.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/the-bouvier-affair
In the end, Poitras has not only escaped the arrest or indictment she feared, but has become a kind of privacy folk hero: Her work has helped to noticeably shift the world’s view of government spying, led to legislation, and won both a Pulitzer and an Academy Award. But if her ultimate fear was to “become the story,” her latest revelations show that’s a fate she can no longer escape–and one she’s come to accept.
http://www.wired.com/2016/02/snowdens-chronicler-reveals-her-own-life-under-surveillance/
Things are exactly what they are, yet never as they seem. We live in a world of tricksters. We never left the pre-Neolithic. It was all a nightmare that went viral. And we know this, because we have modern science. And this is the world described by object-oriented ontology. Which is why OOO is so great, and the real reason why it comes in for such hostile fear and rage. According to this view, an artwork cannot be reduced to its parts or its materials, nor can it be reduced to its creator’s life, nor to some other context, however defined (the last decade, the current geological era, the economic structure of human society, art discourse, power-knowledge – anything). And art has an actual causal effect. Art just is tampering directly with cause and effect, because art is what cause and effect actually is. Art is charisma, pouring out of anything whatsoever, whether we humans consider it to be alive or sentient or not.
http://artreview.com/features/november_2015_feature_timothy_morton_charisma_causality/