A blog by a web developer called Rich
old consultant’s addage … fast, cheap, good … pick 2
Why oh why is it so difficult to get that concept across? I always try to convey this concept when working on a project but its like some kind of mental block. Like…..’why can’t we do it like Google?’…..’er because thier R&D budget is $.5billion ours is $0 (GDP0)’.
Very hung-over. The booze monkeys well and truly kidnapped me and refused to let me out of the pub until closing time…
I am now hung over and annoyed. Had to endure one of those VERY IRRITATING bus journeys this morning, where it seemed as thought every single passenger was out to annoy me with their constant bloody coughing, sneezing and general breathing! Might have well said NUMBER 76 TO LEPER COLONY on the front. Bastards.
When will they learn eh? Some science geezer reckons we should adopt a 364 day calendar so that all dates land on the same day each year. This so called “Calendar-and-Time” (C&T) plan means that calendars will not have to be reprinted each year.
As usual with scientific study, all logical and good so far. However as he has discovered, people are none to happy about the prospect that their birthday will now be consigned to one day of the week for the rest of their life, I mean imagine celebrating your birthday on a Monday for the rest of your life….arghhh! It would be like Groundhog day (kinda, sort of….well nearly). He kindly adds “You have my permission to celebrate your birthday the preceding or following Saturday” oh, well thankyou Lord of the Days.
And under this new proposal certain days will be shunted off the calendar for ever….such as 31st Jan….gone…forever….look what happened on 31st Jan:
1606 – Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes is executed for his plotting against Parliament and James I of England.
1961 – Ham the Chimp travels into outer space.
1990 – The first McDonald’s opens in Moscow, Russia.
1981 – Justin Timberlake, musician born
also Feast day of St. John Bosco. (the Catholics may be none too happy about losing a feast.)
and what does the supreme ruler of dates decree about celebrations that fall on this date: “Henry suggests they celebrate on either 30 January or “consider themselves to be born on the fourth of July”…turd
I mean what a tit. Sure it makes sense, sure it makes things easier. But why can scientists never quite grasp the concept that we like change, we like turbulence, in many ways its what defines us.
‘Henry hopes to have rallied enough support for his plan to start it on 1 January 2006’ – I say we all pretend to go along with it and when he starts to smugly follow his calendar, we all secretly switch to the normal, correct one and totally knacker all his appointments. Maybe a bit far to go for a prank but hey, how else is he going to learn eh?
“Mathematicians could be on the verge of solving two separate million dollar problems” says the Grauniad, indeed the mungo bean munching lefty paper could be right. As i can exclusively reveal below the long awaited (150 years) answer to one of the most complex questions of our epoch. The answer is really quite simple……
Good article on the Grauniad on Saturday entitled: ‘Dim, cloned conservatives’. The story is a tirade against modern Graffiti or ‘art brut’ as it was once referred to. The general crux of the article is ‘it ain’t what it used to be’ and I am forced to agree on this angle.
Back to the issue on Omnipresent Layered Inherent History I posted a little while back. I have started reading a book titled ‘Out of Control’ by Kevin Kelly of Wired fame. I have only just started but noticed a clear similarity with his musings on ‘swarm intelligence’ and Omnipresent Layered Inherent History. Most similar was the concept ‘invisible hand of combinatory systems’ essentially control without overall authority.
A swarm can be defined as:
“a decentralized model, based on the cooperation of autonomous units with a relatively simple and probabilistic behavior that are distributed in the environment and are provided only with local information”
A little simlar to my half arsed attempt at describing Omnipresent Layered Inherent History (“how elements, be they style, emotion, concept or form can be transported in ’spirit’ from one entity to another, mostly due to proximity”).
I feel that models such as art, style, architecture show many similarities with swarms; many practictioners, no overall controll or authority (apart from Saatchi et al).
So if the swarm model holds true, there can be no control of the arts, architecture etc as any undue pressure, will simply be swallowed up by the swarm and either reacted against or incorporated into the whole and evolved. Art can not be destroyed it can only be transofrmed from one form to another. Little similar to Quantum theory (or is that back-action principle of post-quantum theory??; “anything that affects something else must, in turn, be affected by that something else”.) .
Anyway thats my two pennies worth.
John Simpson of the BBC writes in his book ‘A Mad World, My Masters’…..”this is why, like the movies, tabloid journalism bears no relationship to life as we know it; it is too extreme, too lacking in colmplexity. There are too few categories of existence. The people the tabloids write about are either 2-dimensionally glamorous or successful, or they are victims, or they are ‘evil’…..”
Newsflash: Police have launched an investigation after violence erupted in the Big Brother house in the early hours – sparked of by the return of Michelle and Emma from the bedsit. link
Booze appears to be to blame, as the case in the recent rioting in Portugal.
So why are us English so f***ing violent after hitting the sauce? The french could drink us under the table but are nowhere near as nasty when tanked up…I think this needs investigation, and what better way than via the blog.
More soon……
So our Trace isn’t very happy about the ‘Public Sniggering’ at the loss of art in the recent blaze at Momart, infact she is outraged.
Speaking yesterday, Emin said: “What has really upset me isn’t the loss of the work, it is the reaction by the British public. ‘Good riddance to bad art’, the general public sniggering on an audience like [BBC Radio 4’s]Any Questions.”
She continues
“I am not saying they have to understand it. What I am saying is don’t laugh at it when it all burns down in a fire. That is just not fair and it is not funny. It is not polite and it is bad manners. I would never laugh at a disaster like that.”
However I am sure the public would be much more upset if the artists didn’t have certain attitudes towards their own work. Attitudes that seem to be saying to the audience, ‘fuck you’. The nature of most modern British art is one of self-negation, destruction and throw away. Is it any wonder that when the art is literally thrown away the British public (with somewhat a penchant for irony) find the result a little funny?
Emin was once was quoted as saying “The other day I hated my art so much I wanted to smash it, like you abuse a faithful lover.”?
Also ‘I need art like I need God’. I am not sure of Emin’s religious beliefs, but this ambiguous quote seems to suggest both that she needs art and does not need art, depending on the audiences religious viewpoint.
Yet “For years, I made religious artâ€, Emin declares “Then I destroyed it, I did, like, a thousand drawings of Jesus being crucified; I was very interested in Mary Magdalene, I did drawings of her at His feet; I did the Wedding Feast at Cana, and John the Baptist’s hand – just his hand. And I did lots of Depositionsâ€.
So it appears she is somewhat religious but at the same time destroys the art associated with it. Hmmm, again an almost paradoxical quote. She herself seems to be obsessed with the destruction of her own work, and indeed the destruction of the idea behind it.
I may be wrong but it seems to me that the meaning is not lost on the British public, infact I think they get the concepts extremely well, possibly better than Emin?
Anyway, maybe we are all philistines in this country, maybe we are not, maybe we just find the idea that self-destructive work has been destroyed by matters out of the artist’s hands just a little funny.
So, lets us finish here with a quote from Emin:
“I do not believe that at this moment in time, if that changes in years to come I don’t know, but what happens here today and changes as we go along that is part of life’s learning and part of your inner beliefs.”
Clear things up for you?
So the art has literally consumed itself. On Wednesday a warehouse fire destroyed more than 100 artworks from Charles Saatchi’s famous collection. Works such as Tracy Emin’s tent and works by Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas were also destroyed.
Of course any piece of creative work destroyed is always distressing, yet when work of this particular ilk is lost , I can’t but help thinking that it is somewhat ironic. Much of this style of work thrives on the conceptual basis of anti-art, takes its lead from our throw-away culture and planned obscelescense. It is in its own admission somewhat of a fraud, placing much less emphasis on the importance of the object and much more on the concept. So does it really matter that the actual work has been destroyed? Does it in any way enhance the work?
Baudrillard:
“Operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to regenerate a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder-a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary, proving truth by scandal, proving the law by transgression, proving work by the strike, proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution.”
If anything if you could salvage any charred, melted, fused works could they not in fact increase in value due the works pre-disposal to scandal and self-destruction? A kind of mega-art (that finally has some narrative). I look forward to the first show – ‘Inferno’.
Of course the artists are very upset by the destruction, understandably, but are the tears for the work simply for the lack of control? Could it be that the destruction of art, the negating of the concepts of traditional art needs to be controlled just as much by Tracey Emin as Michael Angelo controlled the brush.
“Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony.”
Again Baudrillard babbling away. But interesting point, simulation of death, not actual death (or burnt to a crisp). The simulacrum has been distorted by real world events, and bought crashing down to earth. The works power seemed to be in the simulation of death, or more accurately, the ‘I could have done that’ concept so often cited by the public at these works.
So what now for art, will this have an effect? Will people move away from the self-destruction of art, or move ever more closely to hyper-reality to avoid such an event again?
Essentially its all a load of tosh. Burn’t tosh