Note to self: never say "I could do that", because fact is, I didn't.

If the fall into love happened so rapidly, it is perhaps because the wish to love has preceded the beloved - the need has invented its solution.  The appearance of the beloved is only the second stage of a prior (but largely unconscious) need to love someone - our hunger for love moulding their features, our desire crystallizing around them

-Alain de Botton "Essays in Love"

Found a good site/blog that covers happenings, participatory art, etc.

click

Found a short,  interesting video on TED that talks about how news media shapes our worldview:

Click

culture jam

What I found most interesting about Mark Dey's article was the ending section, in which he discusses the future of culture jamming, especially in the context of "cyberculture".  In our society, where it seems like new inventions and innovations are appearing faster than we can understand how they should fit into our world, the future is a potentially terrifying mystery.  I'm not sure if I can pinpoint a specific direction the future will take, since there are so many options.  I am fairly confident that Dey's outlook may not be far off from the soon-to-be truth, since there is already of evidence of it today.  The possibility of everyone having a spot of their own, published on the internet, is easily imaginable, the way things are going.  However, an important question to ask is how important will these spots be?  I do not see mulitnational corporations being defeating by the mere cyber-presence of a few thousand dissenters.  Convincing the general public that the status quo is not the way things should be will take more than just that.

More than anything though, this essay made me feel paranoid and afraid.  Not in a way that makes me want to culture jam in order to change the way things are, but in a way that makes me want to hide.  

Two interventionist artists:

In May 1985, a Demented biology professor broke the noses off of eighty stone statues found in the Villa Borghese Gardens in Rome.  He attacked a variety of different figures from Italian History.  When caught, he claimed "The KGB are after me".  He also gave the police a slip of paper that he had with him, which stated "I am a UFO".

In 1993, Pierre Pinoncelli urinated into one of the eight Urinals that Marcel Duchamp recreated after the original was lost, while it was on display in Nimes, France.

Paper is really cool.  It is made from dead trees, er, I mean, cellulose pulp.

John Cage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC6h1A6TEIE

Response to "paragraphs on conceptual art" by Sol Lewitt

At first, I thought the essay was a little vague, but by the end I managed to get a clearer idea of what Lewitt seems to be trying to get at.  The bulleted sentences at the end really helps clear things up, even though there are some contradictions.  Example:  #16 says that "if words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics" but the last sentence states that "these sentences comment on art, but are not art).   Is this an oversight, or did Lewitt simplify his view on words as art into a single catch-all for the purpose of the essay?  Maybe the way the words are communicated factor into if they can be considered art; the words Lewitt used are not art because they appeared as magazine articles, but maybe if an artist were to project the same words on the side of a building, he would consider it art?

To me, it seemed like the way Lewitt describes conceptual art is more like a different way to view art, rather than a whole seperate part of art, or art-making.