The enigma of not much (the 6.2-million-dollar banana)

Maurizio Cattelan "Comedian" 2019

Artist's statement:

To me, Comedian was not a joke; it was a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value. At art fairs, speed and business reign, so I saw it like this: if I had to be at a fair, I could sell a banana like others sell their paintings. I could play within the system, but with my rules. I can’t say how people will react, but I hope these new works will break up the normal viewing habits and open a discussion on what really matters. We are surrounded by conversations based on immaterial structures, social values and hierarchies that we created, but usually we prefer to forget this; it’s like being anaesthetised.

                                                                 -- Maurizio Cattelan 

Open Call to Artists and Performers

Just crossed my desk, from Terrance Lindall:

ENTRY FORMS & SAMPLES DOWNLOAD HERE https://wahcenter.wixsite.com/wah-center/entry-instructions Instructions: Please read them very carefully Submission Fee: 1) By PayPal ($53, including $3 financial charge), on Paypal pay to: wahcenter@earthlink.net 2) By mail, send check ($50) to: WAH Center, 135 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Joy to the World Co-curated by Yuko Nii and Terrance Lindall Show Dates: Dec.14 - Jan. 11, 2025 Opening Reception: Sat. Dec.14, 3-5pm Submission Deadline: Mon. Dec. 2   You will receive the acceptance notice as we review your submission Delivery Dates: Sat. Dec. 7 & Sun. Dec. 8, 1-5 pm   Pick Up Dates: Sat. Jan. 11, 5-7pm & Jan. 12, 2025, 1-5 pm Gallery Hours: Sat. & Sun. 1-5 pm Dear Artists and Friends, The “Joy to the World” show is to Celebrate the Holiday Season with IMAGINATIVE, BEAUTIFUL, POSITIVE, ECLECTIC, JOYOUS, FUN ART including toys, dolls, mechanical men, comics, fine art, illustration art, greeting cards, posters, etc. “We have experienced recently a life threatening, darkest period in our life. The deadly coronavirus pandemic, followed by a social pandemic. Nothing seemed to help lift our spirits in hope fo humanity.” Yuko Nii Although scientists have been warning us for more than a half century that global warming causes climate change, we have ignored their warnings until it has started showing disastrous evidence in our lifetime throughout the world. We tend to use global warming and climate change interchangeably, but we should be aware of the differences between these terminologies.   Global warming is a part of climate change, which is a broader term that includes the long changes to the earth’s climate system. Global warming is the rise in the earth’s average surface temperature. It’s caused by increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuels.   Climate change can be caused by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation and agriculture. However, natural processes like volcanic activity, ocean patterns, and variation in the earth’s orbit can also contribute to climate change.   Questions: Witnessing todays’ worsening environmental disasters and the clearly divided social, economical, political world, are we facing the end of the world soon? Or, can we expect to see a brighter future in our lifetime? Learning about the past American history, we know that previous generations experienced unthinkable miseries in their life times, but they have overcome. What helped to improve the conditions? How did they resolve the hardships? It is interesting to read what the American economists and environmentalist have stated in their positive outlook on the American economy based on the historical facts. The 21st Greatest Century The American Economist, Stephen Moore detailed the ways in which Americans were better off at the end of the 20th century, as paraphrased here: The latter part of the 19th century was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, child death, horses, horse manure, candles, 12- hour work days, Jim Crow laws, tenements, slaughter houses, and outhouses, lynchings. To live to 50 was to count one’s blessings. Their central premise of this study is that there has been more improvement in the human condition for people living in the United States in this century than for all people in all previous centuries of human history combined. As we move into the 21st century, most Americas who are considered “poor” today have routine access to a quality food, health care, consumer products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and 19th- century European royalty, with all their combined wealth, could not have afforded.   Another American Economist and Environmental Optimist, Julian L. Simon, said that the human mind is the “ultimate resource’ and that humanity can overcome scarcity through innovation. He believed that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource that can lead to increase supply, greater efficiency, and the development of substitutes. So: Joy to the World! ENTRY FORMS & SAMPLES DOWNLOAD HERE  https://wahcenter.wixsite.com/wah-center/entry-instructions Instructions: Please read them very carefully Submission Fee: 1) By PayPal ($53, including $3 financial charge), on Paypal pay to: wahcenter@earthlink.net 2) By mail, send check ($50) to: WAH Center, 135 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11211   Submission Materials: Send to: joyatwah@gmail.com 1) Complete Entry Form with clear writing. Entry Form attached below 2) Artwork Images, limited to 3 pieces in high resolution, printable images (300 dpi), big size images. 3) Resume (in chronological order) and Statement combined together within 600 words. Follow the samples of Resume/Statement attached below, and create your own resume looking similar to the samples in layout, format, and the category orders, etc.

Williamsburg Art & Historical Center 344 Grand Street #3, 11211, Brooklyn

Pilgrims Going to Church, 1867, by George Henry Boughton

Description HERE

Happy Thanksgiving

Water Molecule Formation

San Francisco, 1960

Mosquito Wings by Dick Rampen

Dick Rampen writes:

Another childhood memory. My grampa bought the unfinished mosquito bomber wings from deHavilland at the end of WW2. They filled a 30 acre field in various states of completion and he turned them into roof trusses, sheds and chicken coups. The landing gear were used as hydraulics for anything and everything.

The price was under a dollar a wing just to make the purchase legal.

My brother and I used them as teeter totters and as a playground.

Instruments of war became toys and buildings, a much better use.

Dick Rampen's art has appeared in the past four volumes of Emanations.

Mathematical Recreation

The Pentiment Series at the WAH Center

 

Clik HERE.

Ruins of the Ziggurat of Dur-Kurigalzu - consider as a sculpture?

Title: "Untitled" (14th century BCE)

Genre: Modern Art

Well-tempered liben and stamped baked bricks with erosion effects

Highbrow wisdom for the pure of heart

Tomorrow is another day, but today is today.

Why make books? Why go into space?

The Prisoner, episode 8, "Dance of the Dead" - A philosophical essay of "institutions" (a moral sociology of institutions and institutionalized persons)

Highbrow advice from George Washington

Do aesthetic criteria attend viewing or education? Are aesthetic experiences driven by simple or complex ideas? And what relationships among the primary and secondary qualities of objects can we describe in the wake of the "experience" of an aesthetic encounter? Finally, why do these questions matter?

Hannah Hoch (German, 1889-1978) “Sea Serpent”, 1937, Collage, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Stuttgart (photo from Belvedere exhibition)

Do aesthetic values have a place in the description of this image? Or should we instead emphasize aesthetic virtues?

Max Ernst – La mer et le soleil, 1926

Values are synthetic a priori dicta established by some arbitrary authority, while virtues rather reflect the subjective activity of enjoyment and appreciation. To each his own, though I should be remis were I not to point out that in ethics and moral philosophy the values vs. virtues distinction carries significant political implications.

Emanations 11 has been published!

The latest volume of International Authors’ literary anthology series, Emanations 11 presents stunning art, illustrations and writing from around the world. Over five-hundred pages long, this new book sustains International Authors’ commitment to innovation and experimentation: challenging visual pieces, intriguing artists’ statements, idiosyncratic memoirs, candid academic reflections, astute poetic expressions and cutting-edge speculative fiction. The forty-three contributors represent Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Nepal, India, Oman, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.

Click HERE (or the cover image) to order.

A collection of new short stories inspired by J. G. Ballard: Wave IX is available for pre-order

From the Space Cowboy Books description:

A tribute to the fictitious magazine Wave IX from J.G. Ballard's 1961 short story "Studio 5, The Stars." In the fictitious version of the magazine Ballard predicts the rise of machine generated poetry; and in this real-world version of Wave IX the current debacle over machine generated works is satirized, battled against, and disregarded with human generated works, tributes to Ballard, works inspired by the story, and more. Wave IX features an multigenerational cast of writers and artists from all over the world.

Featuring stories, poetry, and art from: Eugen Bacon, F.J. Bergmann, Michael Butterworth, Jacques Garnier, Jean-Paul L. Garnier, Carter Kaplan, Jardine Libaire, Jonathan Nevair, Charles Platt, Aaron Sheppard, & Mark Soden Jr.

This anthology is published by Space Cowboy Books, an award-winning brick and mortar bookstore in Joshua Tree, California, an independent publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times podcast, and event space.

Edited by Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Product Details

Price

$12.99  $12.08

Publisher

Space Cowboy Books

Publish Date

December 03, 2024

Pages

94

Dimensions

5.5 X 8.5 X 0.24 inches | 0.24 pounds

Language

English

Type

Paperback

EAN/UPC

9798989630820

Click HERE (or the cover image) to order.

You Are What Your Eat (1968)

You Are What You Eat described

Ruth Law Oliver, aviatrix

 Click HERE.

editing continues

Examining a proof copy.  Emanations 11 looks good.  More information soon.

Andromeda Nebula

 

Andromeda Nebula: A Space-Age Tale is a science fiction novel by the Soviet writer and paleontologist IvanYefremov, written in 1955–1956 and published in 1957.

Aesthetic enactment via adept experimentation and volitional composition modalities