Richard Prince, Untitled Cowboy, 1989, Chromogenic print, 50 x 70 inches
We’re only a couple days away from a month of seemingly endless Best and Worst lists for the year, but other than that anticipation there isn’t a whole lot going on. Surfing the net yesterday yielded these worthy posts.
- An early but great start to the aforementioned lists “Things from ’07 that I don’t want to deal with in ’08. Thank C-Monster for that post.
- Tom Moody notes the difference in critical stance Roberta Smith takes on Richard Prince’s mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 1992 and now at the Guggenheim in 2007. Smith takes a much softer tone the second time around while Moody in a post that follows observes weakness in virtually all of the later work. I too see the weaknesses Moody points out, and rather wish I’d seen a review by a mainstream critic who felt this way, particularly because Prince’s car hoods, joke paintings and master inspired works so obviously lack the substance of his earlier rephotographed advertisements. Schjeldahl wrote negatively about the exhibition as well in the New Yorker, largely getting it right, though by the end he criticizes a deKooning rip off for not being executed well enough, which even if correct, misses the point, and sounds awfully conservative. As an intellectual exercise this kind of practice just isn’t engaging, (though I have been known to make exception for his Britney Spears deKooning portraits.)
- Glasstire’s Ivan Lozano provides a good overview of where to find Net Art and Net Art discussion. In light of the recent Wall Street Journal article on the like, it reminded me that the WSJ would benefit from the ability to post more jpegs, gifs, videos etc. I know it sounds like nitpicking, but Net Art looks more like itself when there’s a lot of it. (Here’s to not biting the hand that feeds me: Thanks to Mr. LaVallee for writing the article and speaking with me at length on the subject)
Loshadka, A group surfing blog noted by Ivan Lozano in Glasstire
- In Internet news, according to a new study, Internet advertising works better than television ads. Nate Anderson of Arc Technica thinks this is a good thing for television networks sharing their content online as well. (via: Slashdot.) On a related note, Felix Salmon observes that television ad rates remain fairly constant as viewership decreases. There’s a bunch of easy math in his post likely to make readers like me a little uneasy, but Salmon sums up his observations nicely for the more obtuse: “On a cpm basis, then, I reckon TV ad rates are going to continue to rise for the foreseeable future. In turn, that will be good for newspapers and websites, whose ad rates will look increasingly attractive in comparison. Everybody wins – except, maybe, the advertisers.”
- My favorite public bench of 2007 removed by New York’s DOT.Via Matt Lucas
