On the Web: February 2005 Archives
eBay and American Photo magazine are holding an auction of photographs and photographic equipment donated by high profile phototographers such as Ron Haviv, James Natchwey, Rick Sammon, Patrick McMullen, Steve McCurry. Current high bid is for a Canon lens used by Robert Clark of National Geographic to capture the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. That's followed by a 1971 George Kalinsky photo of Ali and Frazier, signed by all three.
Check out the full list of participants and items up for auction. Make it quick, though, the auctions end March 2nd.
Over at greg.org, there's an amusing and thought-provoking analysis of the much ballyhooed $20 million figure bandied about as the cost for "The Gates".
"Whatever the Christos' can convince their accountants--and the IRS--to accept, more power to'em. Given that they've set up their practice as a professional corporation whose core competency is persuading bureaucracies to allow them to do massive, nonsensical things, maybe their accounting practices are a conceptual--or absurdist--art work themselves."
Whoa, look out. Christo and Jean-Claude are rather adamant that their work is not conceptual art, which one would assume extends to their accounting practices. Plus I'm not sure that Greg has taken into account Christo's claim that he works 17-hour days, 7 days a week.
I try not to post too much, or think too much, about blogging itself. Art is too full of navel gazing exercises already, but it's human nature to be self-absorbed. ArtForum and its ilk are the usual targets of online derision of "old media." The same distraction afflicts the design community it seems. Check out this great comment thread over at the AIGA blog in response to the posting "Blogs vs. Mags" by Steven Heller, the art director of the The New York Times Book Review. Heller is defending print, but has this to say about blogging's growth:
"Despite a few insufferable rants, blog content is now often as sophisticated and informative as any design magazine, sometimes even more entertaining. Blogs have also proven that, unlike newsgroups, the writing is not entirely unedited and can be quite complex. For that matter, not all print periodicals, despite extended lead times and editing staff, are always well edited."
The post and discussion are specific to the reading and writing habits of the design community but the art world is not so different in terms of its left-leaning, bloated sense of self-importance.
