For those of you still living in Berlin, please go and see this natural-pseudo-scientific-spectacle for me. It’s called “Soma,” and it’s produced by the artist Carsten Holler. For 1000 euro you can also become assimilated into the work through the cultural tourist framework of a (bizarre) art/boutique hotel. The Hamburger Bahnhof made a site for the exhibition cum theme park which consists of no less than 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, 8 mice and 2 flies.

Straight from the HB PR Team:
“Before the eyes of the observers unfolds an expansive “living picture”, a symmetrical experimental field, which is divided in two parts along its center line and which compares the ordinary world with the realm of Soma in a double-image experiment. This is an experiment, that find its completion in the imagination of the observer and whose evaluation is subject to your power of observation. On a mushroom like platform in midst of the arrangement resides a bed, where guests will have the opportunity to spend a night at the museum and to dive into the world of Soma.”

Below is a video outline of the exhibition. Please pardon the advertisement.

On a more domestic note, the Hammer museum is producing an interactive event platform titled, “Houseplant Vacation.” Participants are invited to give their houseplants a vacation, during the Hammer’s August cultural retreat for plants. Throughout the entire month, participant’s plants will be installed in the light flooded Lindbrook terrace, and presented with a series of readings, performances and musical events, for plants every Saturday from 1-4pm. The project offers a plant release waiver, in case sick plants infect others, and appears to be organized in part by machine projects. Learn more about the project here.

A hilarious bit of discursive theatrics. My favorite part is undeniably the correlation between modernism and the father. Jesus… I think we’re distant cousins.

A little search helps turn up additional Jayson Musson, or Hennessy Youngman, productions. For instance, he has an album available here, and additional humorous paintings and drawings on his site.

Dear Jayson, I hope you make it.

YouTube video originally seen on ArtFagCity.

An undeniable force in pattern development, Mr. Rogers helped pioneer performative pop-models for sincerity and laid the foundation for the consciousness industry. One can’t help but admire, and thus mine, his obsolete position in media production.

This video’s non-human theatrics of depicting the relationship between an artist and a consumer [at an art fair] are perfect for confronting the complicated nature of the relationship. It’s my personal opinion that the heart of this complicated relationship belongs to a caricatured public-relation of modern art and its critical apparatus, perpetuated by both teams on the playing field, and embodied here, by these adorable little computer abstractions.

Aidan is a 5 year old boy who was recently diagnosed with leukemia. He loves to draw and he loves monsters. He sells some prints of his drawings to raise money for his bills.

Here is his Etsy store, where you can buy his prints.
Here is his blog, where you can read more of his story.

Humor in art has historically been seen as being in poor taste, blasphemous, and sometimes even subversive. Thus, you can’t teach humor in art, and the fuzzy sheen of the serious will continue to be the bid of collector awareness. Whatever. The professional Brit humorist, Harry Hill, has been making these paintings recently and I can’t help but wonder if I love them because they’re funny, or if because for some reason they represent some sort of therapeutic freedom from art. Look, see and wonder.

I like to imagine that collapsing the economy is extremely important for establishing additional relational value structures and ultimately encouraging more sustainable ways to survive together in the 21st Century. [If you're a return-reader, you are well aware of this and are probably tired of hearing me say it.]

Cue the presciently [somewhat] well supported efforts of Temporary Services, who are comprised of Brett Bloom, Marc Fischer and Salem Collo-Julin, and have been producing exhibitions, events, projects, and publications since 1998. Their latest project is Art Work : A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, and is directly concerned with the livelihood of artists in the Untited States of America.

Their efforts to establish a professional knowledge base and platform for concrete career sustainability is an incredibly transgressive action for the fine art industry [including the aspects of it that don't involve class theatrics: Jeffrey Deitch/Biennales/Art Fairs].

Finally, an organization that helps artists do what they’re not inherently good at, because they’re mostly arrested by their own intuitive organizations.

On the projects download page, you can download the publication in various formats, making the consumption of the support-oriented information extremely easy to access.

If you are an art educator, please make this publication project part of your curriculum, IMMEDIATELY.

Additionally, you can learn more about Temporary Services and the Art Work publication at Rhizome.org.

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JEFF KOONS DIES IN TOKYO BLAST is being reported from the ‘Unknown Journal’s’ site. Not only does this seem like an absurd media situation because of the claim of an art-terrorist group, but the back and forth questioning of the ‘reality’ of the situation, via the comments section, gives us a wonderful opportunity to admire the ‘everything is critical’ apparatus of art applied to the world of blogging. Perhaps the headline also gives us an identification of blogging aggregation as a performative tactic, or perhaps this actually did happen. Either way, the opportunity to exercise preparation for the death of one of art’s greatest living celebrities is an appropriate activity to participate in, yet hopefully the exercise is being started well in advance of the actual event [of said death]. I wouldn’t imagine death upon anyone.

However, if this death news is an aggregation stunt, the author will be glad to know that I did find their blog through it and I’m now linking others to it.

The excerpt below was taken directly from the about page:

__________________________

Currently reading through, e-flux journal #12, which is chock-full of exceptional texts potentially teetering on the opportunity and failure of asking the question What is Contemporary Art?…

The most operational* of the texts is Jan Verwoert’s Standing on the Gates of Hell, My Services Are Found Wanting. This [um] essay [?] encourages the art-text to have potential beyond the typically discursive lines that their writers often fall short with by working on the same liminal grounds that the work of art often works on.

*Operational is being used here as a way to describe a process of delineating a phenomenon by performing it [a sort of in-and-of-itself].

The following excerpts have been compiled in order to persuade you to read for yourself.

“Standing there, I find myself, for instance, in the company of Irit Rogoff, and I am with her when she writes that what makes us contemporaries is the act of looking at the problems of our time together and the realization that we share these problems—and maybe not much more apart from these problems—as we inhabit the condition of contemporaneity together. I agree with her in principle.”
…
“Weeping and laughing on the gates of hell, I do not feel particularly postmodernist. Postmodernism was neither particularly funny nor sad.”
…
“In art and thinking we find the historical codes for understanding what meaning will have meant and how experience will have been experienced.”
…
“This is done through a simple trick. It is the secret of the trade of true liars: Always only give people what they already have and think they deserve. But give it to them in a guise that allows them to rejoice in the illusion that they received something new, foreign, and exciting.”
…
“A philosophy that creates laughter because it is a joke and consoles the weeping because it is a philosophy of tears, a philosophy in tears.”
…
“Standing on the gates hell, facing the gates of hell, laughing and weeping on the gates of hell, I summon you now, my uncontemporary contemporaries, because you have summoned me to come here, to address you.”
…
[Read it.]

And for those of you like me, who find yourselves needing to flip back to the author photo, continuously, while reading a book [so you can feel better about trying to understanding where the hell something is coming from], I’ve attached the following photo.

It’s time we come to terms with the art religion. Or, if this language construct doesn’t suit your fancy, we can simply rethink it as “It’s time we come to terms with the art cult.” Or, if you think we’ve already done this, and/or the idea makes you uncomfortable, we can just continue to think that art is just representation and there’s nothing more deeply involved in understanding its correlations with other human activity’s emotional/behavioral/ritualistic constructs and/or beliefs.

First, let’s take a moment to note that this article was prompted by the fortuitous occurrence of coming across the article by Alain de Botton [below] and the performative-process-explication [of sorts] by Jonathan Meese [also below], within the same five minutes of researching the internet. Could this be mere chance? You be the judge by reviewing the following, afformentioned evidence.

Exhibit A:

“Come all ye faithless,” by Alain de Botton, Philosopher and broadcaster, found in: What’s Next essays in Monocle magazine.
“…
My guess is that humanity is slowly rediscovering what it lost when the developed world (the US-aside) went secular in the 20th century. It seems evident that what we now need is not a choice between atheism and religion – but a new secular religion: a religion for atheists. What would such a peculiar idea involve? For a start, lots of new buildings akin to churches, temples and cathedrals. Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us. It isn’t surprising that secular people continue to be interested in cathedrals. These great works of ecclesiastical architecture perform the very clever and eternally useful function of relativising those who walk inside them. We feel small inside a cathedral and recognise the debt that sanity owes to such a feeling.

In addition, a secular religion would use all the tools of art in order to create an effective kind of propaganda in the name of kindness and virtue. Rather than seeing art as a tool to shock and surprise (the two great emotions promoted by most contemporary works), a secular religion would return to an earlier view that art should improve us. It should be a form of propaganda for a better, nobler life.
…”

Exhibit B:

The hilariously beautiful, poetic and at times, prophetic, performance of Jonathan Meese explaining his conception and use of art. [Video Embedded Below. Link here.]

[note: I believe]

Because of their nature [in believing], ideologies can assimilate and replicate almost any form and/or behavioral performance of another ideology in order to convert its user. This phenomenon is charmingly also partly responsible for the other behemoth of an ideological human mode of exchange: the economy. And now, what’s happening to the economy, again?

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