Techno-drawing

When new technologies give old techniques the flashy look that attracts.

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Beyond...

Is it possible to accelerate and catalyze social change through communication without reproducing market methods? This question is at the core of the Beyond... category of Memefest. Responses to this challenge should explore ways of shifting and disrupting existing power while involving people in ways other than that of the passive consumer.

If you have an idea of this sort, hurry up and send it - because the examples they show on their page are sometimes really desperate attempts to do something almost impossible - make a change.
(Not that some of them aren't funny...)

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Reading Room

I have been thinking of creating a Reading Room for a while now. It simply isn't fair to recommend a book without telling you anything about it. This is what I did: the reviews will all be posted with a January 2000 date. This way, going to my January 2000 archives means going to my Reading Room. I have just posted my first review : of the book "Live. Art and Performance". I also changed the "Book of the Month" on the sidebar. It is now linked to the Reading Room, and not directly to Amazon, as it used to be (I know, it wasn't very nice of me, or very wise, since obviously nobody buys books they know nothing about).

Jan Family

Have you ever had the dream of creating art with your entire family? Having a sort of a big workshop where everyone participates, and we talk about it during the meals, and have fun doing it all together... If this idyllic vision has been yours, but the family just wasn't up to it - do what a few Danish artists in London did - create one. It's really as simple as that: call yourself the Jan Family (no, actually, that one's taken), or any other thing, and just be a family. With a little luck and effort your offspring will be as pretty as Jan Family's page. Their art is very diversified, ranging from songs to photos to net art, but it has a certain elegance about it which makes it quite appealing and easy to watch. Slightly too nice? Maybe not in the real world. And then, it seems like the internet spectator is a little abandoned sometimes, without a clue as to what he is watching. Which can be nice. Sometimes. Well, but go see the site and judge by yourselves.
(via r-echos)

Become an artist in 14 easy steps

Here is a guide for my pragmatic readers, courtesy of Donny Miller.
(I would never have dared to link to this if I hadn't originally found it at art.blogging.la.)
(Am I becoming cynical again?)

When avant-garde artists consume

Our guest from the future will not avoid yet another interesting discovery. Those who go to visit the exhibition of avant-garde art, who buy an "incomprehensible" sculpture or participate in a happening, are dressed and groomed according to the established cannons of fashion, they wear jeans or brand clothes, they put on make-up according to the model of beauty promoted by the color magazines, the cinema, the TV, that is, the mass media. They take example from the ideals of beauty proposed by the world of the commercial consumption that the avant-garde art has fought against for over half a century. How are we to interpret this contradiction? Without trying to explain it, we can say it is typical of the 20th century.

- Umberto Eco, The History of Beauty (2004), here in my translation from Polish.
(You can read several interesting reviews of The History of Beauty at Amazon. As always, I only send you to the books I find genuinely brilliant. This a truly amazing piece of work, as usually in the case of Eco it combines profound insight with unparalleled sense of humour and sensibility)

(Matthew Barney)

Changes

I have started to introduce some changes to the New Art blog's appearance. As you can see, so far it's very small-scale (strategic ;)) : the page now has a favicon (tiny logo next to the address). The little image has to do both with contemporary art and with Portugal. The logo in the top right corner - the "network" - is also about to be replaced. I will be experimenting with some new images, and writing about the proposed changes. I would like to know your opinion!