Absent without leave

Don't Laugh

2009-11-06T10:10:56+00:00

Laugh until the marketing shills have to change their tack. Laugh until all billboards are just polite requests. “Please investigate our new product online if you have a moment. We’re really quite proud of it. Thank you ever so much.”

We didn’t have a TV for most of my childhood, and it’s scary to look back and notice its efficiency, before and after. Its introduction brought neediness; I found my young self distressed that I did not have all the toys and clothes I wanted. After I learned what an Eddie Bauer edition car was (precisely what we didn’t have—tinted power windows, premium sound system, leather everywhere), I used to play a game in my head: each time I saw a car I fancied, I’d say/think “I want that in Eddie Bauer.” Eventually it was just shortened to “That,” and, although inaudible, it didn’t count unless I formed the word with my mouth. I spent a few years touching my tongue to the back of my front teeth, quietly coveting a dozen or dozens of cars each day. “That. That. That. That. That. That. That. That.”

A young boy consciously cataloging all the things he’d never have—how depressing.

But it was precisely the desired outcome.

Now days I can’t watch television for more than a couple minutes without becoming apoplectic. Hernia-inducing levels of rage. “How dare they insult our intelligence like that? Cleansing micro-beads? Really!?” and on and on.

So I try to laugh instead. I laugh to drive away the knowledge that marketing ‘wisdom’ still works on a great many people. I laugh in hopes of looking like less of a cynic. I laugh to try and broadcast the insanity of it all.

Ordinary Celebrities

2009-11-04T09:47:10+00:00

From Magtastic Blogsplosion | Jelou!

Regular readers may know of my fondness for Karen magazine, an occasional publication whose slogan is “made out of the ordinary”, and which intelligently subverts the concept of celebrity magazines.

Spanish magazine eljelou (which sounds a bit like “Hello!” when you say it in Spanish) has gone one step further by creating an Hola!-style magazine about random ordinary people. “What we publish is what you send us, with your commentary and your photos. We do the rest, and publish it in a kiosk-style magazine,” reads their website.

At first I thought it was a print-on-demand service for bespoke souvenir magazines, but no – it comes out every two weeks, featuring different people you’ve never heard of, and an annual subscription costs 55 euros. There are some spreads over here, including features on Almudena and Roberto’s holiday in Ireland and the marriage of Paula and Pablo.

It’s a creation of new Spanish company Publicaciones Absurdas, which more than hints that it might all be a postmodern joke – but then I always thought suspected that about reality TV anyway.

Control Print

2009-11-04T09:42:19+00:00

Johnson Design Center :: Control Print

A Collaboration with the Royal College of Art, London
Considering the Fate of Ink on Paper Through Explorations in Design, Craft, and Technology
Saturday, November 7 - Sunday, December 20, 2009
Opening Reception: November 6, 7:30-9 p.m.

What is the fate of print in a digital age? Parsons The New School for Design takes on this challenge with Control Print, a collaborative exhibition with the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, which explores the intersection of craft and technology. The exhibition will be on view from November 7 through December 14 at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. An opening reception will be held on November 6 from 7:30-9 p.m.

Control Print features works by a number of notable international artists and designers who play with the notion of digital technology. In this first American presentation, prominent members of the Parsons community create work in traditional, digital, and mixed media that extend the idea of ink on paper and showcase how machinery and technology can enter the representational process. First conceived by RCA as a research project investigating the possibilities of a customized future for digital art and design, Control Print also features the results of these experiments in a series of limited edition book spreads, large-scale artwork, and digital projections and renderings.

“The Control Print research project was an effort to elevate the digital press, and consider its place in the future of the printed page,” said Russell Warren-Fisher, co-organizer, designer, and lecturer in Communication Art and Design at RCA. “Partnering with Parsons has allowed us to keep this investigation alive through a reflective, cross-cultural dialogue.”

Recruiting an Arts Chair

2009-10-28T00:35:20+00:00

As Charlotte Higgins points out in the Guardian, the London Arts Council is bogged down in a bitter political and partisan row - with a dash of personality politics thrown in. This is a terrible situation, as any grown up can recognise. The London Arts Council need to regain control over the recruitment of its own chair to avoid further ludicrous shenanigans.

Arts Council turns political football | Charlotte Higgins | Culture | The Guardian

None of the other regional arts councils' chairs are decided by outsiders; the mayor's role in the London post was established by Johnson's predecessor, Ken Livingstone. The only way out of this now discredited process is surely for the Arts Council to wrest back control for the appointment from the mayor, and bring it back in line with recruitment for all its other regional chairs. The whole point of the "arm's length" principle is that the Arts Council should be at a distance from politics – not embroiled in them.

Redefining public art will end with a whimper, not a bang

2009-10-24T01:04:46+01:00

When I saw that Moira Sinclair from the Arts Council had said that the commissions for the Olympics will 'redefine public art', I have had a sinking feeling in my heart. I know this will end badly - or more likely not with a bang but with a whimper. Adrian Hamilton in the Independent put it well:

This redefines art, but not in a good way - Adrian Hamilton

There are two simple rules of public patronage of the arts. One is that, if you do it for a social or political purpose, it will fail. And the second is that if you hand over the actual commissioning to the Arts Council it will produce the very worst art.

And so it is proving with the Arts Council awards for the regional projects to accompany the 2012 Olympic Games. Each will involve the communities, each will represent their place and each will be truly awful.

Giant puppets, crocheted lions, football matches for amateurs – all chosen for the very best reasons that have nothing to do with art, its creation or purpose.

Ever since the Olympic Games were first awarded to London the art world has complained at the diversion of lottery funds to this enterprise.

Now they've got a £5.4m pot and this is what has been done with it. The pieces, declares Moira Sinclair, executive director of the Arts Council England, will "redefine what public arts will mean in 2012". On that at least she's dead right.

Painting isn't Easy, Hirsty

2009-10-18T00:41:07+01:00

In my self-anointed but honest guise as the 'first ever' critic (or critiquer) of Damien Hirst, could I but love the opprobium that rains down upon his smug head upon the launch of his latest endeavours (stolen from Two Coats of Paint). Mostly I just love this catty line, "I’m glad Damien Hirst has sobered up and had children and gone to live in the country. He’d better find himsef some hobby, but not, I suggest, painting."

Two Coats of Paint: Painting isn't so easy

Martin Gayford reports on the latest startling departure for Damien Hirst: In his new show at the Wallace Collection, he's made the paintings himself. "As always with Hirst, the presentation is theatrically brilliant. The pictures, all done between 2006 and 2008, hang on walls covered in specially woven French silk at the heart of one of the choicest arrays of old masters and objets d’art in the world. When you leave the galleries where Hirst’s pictures are displayed, you walk into a room studded with masterpieces by Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck. So for sheer chutzpah, he can’t be faulted. On the other hand, in that Olympian context, it’s hard to be fair to these slightly tentative new works. Once you get past the sumptuous silk and old-master frames, you can’t help noticing that this is a series of pastiches of Francis Bacon, circa 1950."

From the BBC News round up of reviews: Sarah Crompton: “Although they have impact as a a group,individually many of the paintings simply don’t pass muster. Details are tentatively painted; compositions fall apart under scrutiny.”Adrian Searle: “At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent.” Rachel Campbell-Johnston: “Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole.” And Tom Lubbock says of the paintings: “They’re extremely boring. Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student.” Christopher Howse: "I’m glad Damien Hirst has sobered up and had children and gone to live in the country. He’d better find himsef some hobby, but not, I suggest, painting."

"Damien Hirst: No Love Lost: Blue Paintings," Wallace Collection, London. Through Jan. 24, 2010.

Artists in line for TOXIC ART PRIZE

2009-10-17T23:19:35+01:00

The Poor Mouth: Trafigura - Corporate Criminals
Hey, artists, you could win £4,000 from a bunch of poisoning cheating lying shits - would that make you feel great? Would that make your career go with a zing? Read on ...

1. Say you wanted to start an art prize for young artists (always a good idea, not enough people do this)
And you were looking around for someone to sponsor it.
Not only sponsor it, but to put their name on it.
You want this prize to last for years, year after year.
So what sort of company would you choose?
Of course, we can't be too sniffy these days, but we'd like the namers of our art prize to have clean hands, in a corporate sense.
We'd like to think that they would have reasons for funding our prize that weren't totally self serving.
And we'd like them to pay for the privilege.

2. Say you were a company that traded oil around the world.
You'd had a bit of difficulty, following your dumping of toxic waste in Africa.
Thousands of people were affected, poisoned, the details are argued over, but not the fact that it happened.
You've spent a few years trying to avoid liability.
Trying to avoid having the facts brought out into the open.
Journalists have been doing their work. They've got hold of internal emails that are fairly damming.
A report you commissioned has been leaked, it's a bit iffy as well.
You're using hard end lawyers to injunct everyone you can think of, to try to stop discussion of the story.
One of your directors, who as leader of the Conservatives in the Lords, has quit.
You're looking for some good PR. You don't mind paying for the privilege.

OK, so bringing Trafigura and artists together seemed like a good idea.
Except that it is damaging to the artists, the judges, the gallery and the art world generally.
But it is great news for Trafigura, who paid £4,000 for the privilege.
Yes, that's right. It cost them £4,000 to attach their name to an art world prize.
The prize is run by suckers who think Trafigura are really 'the good guys', and that it's all media lies.
Yes, the organisers of the prize are giving out great PR for Trafigura. If you know how much Pottinger-Bell type PR costs, you'll see the value in this prize to them.

But my view is this - NO ARTIST WITH ANY BRAINS SHOULD HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
Any artist who wins this prize is poisoned. Poisoned.
I'm waiting for artists and judges to come out and say the disassociate themselves from this prize - but I won't hold my breathe.

[UPDATE: They binned the connection. This is exactly what I suggested to them on Friday. I said it wasn't worth the 4 grand, better to just go without the money. And guess what - they decided that the artists could do without it. Well, artists need money, but not this sort of crap. This is how the curator told me:

Ivan, I guess you have not had the Cynthia Corbett's official announcement on Friday that we have relinquished Trafigura's sponsorship. The prize is renamed the Young Masters Art Prize and will be honorific, not monetary.

The artists and art prize judges approve and support our decision.

I would be grateful if you could stop spreading erroneous rumours that are damaging to people who have no association with Trafigura whatsoever.

Constance Slaughter ]

Here are the artists concerned:
Gemma Anderson, Lluís Barba, Jessie Bond, Charlotte Bracegirdle, Maisie Broadhead, Cecile Chong, Héctor de Gregorio, Alice Evans, Art Basel exhibitors Ghost of a Dream, Kerry Jameson, Valerie Mary, Ali Miller, David Roche, Constance Slaughter, Antonia Tibble and Masaki Yada.
Constance Slaughter is also the curator - she is acting as unpaid PR for Trafigura as well.

The judges are:
Medeia Cohan-Petrolino, Head Curator for the University of the Arts London; Tom Hunter, artist; Lock Anderson Kresler, Christie’s Contemporary Art Department; Averill Ogden, Outset Art Fund, and Gilda Williams, Goldsmith’s lecturer.

If you know any of them, drop them a line and tell them. Just tell them.
And why not call the organisers and tell them what you think: Cynthia Corbett 020 8947 6782 or 07939 085076 (all from their web site, public information)

- With thanks to Will Wiles

Home - Young Masters: contemporary art exhibition, October/November 2009

The forthcoming Young Masters exhibition, presented by The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, and curated by Constance Slaughter and Beth Colocci features emerging and newly established artists whose work is inspired by Old Masters. Through painting, photography, sculpture, and installation, each artist references an element of the established art historical canon, either through technique, imagery, or subject, whilst establishing an undeniably contemporary spin on highly revered paintings. The artists offer images that are familiar icons, often instantly recognisable, yet re-interpreted, distorted and somewhat uncanny.

Young Masters includes work by an international group of artists including Gemma Anderson, Lluis Barba, Jessie Bond, Charlotte Bracegirdle, Maisie Broadhead, Cecile Chong, Hector de Gregorio, Alice Evans, artist duo Ghost of a Dream, Kerry Jameson, Valerie Mary, Ali Miller, David Roche, Constance Slaughter, Antonia Tibble and Masaki Yada, all of whom address contemporary issues through their practices, often with irony, showing both reverence and irreverence to the Old Masters. The work will be displayed simultaneously in Kensington and the East End throughout October.

Young Masters starts on 7 October at the historic building of Sphinx Fine Art on Kensington Church Street, where selected work will be hung alongside Old Masters pictures, creating a fascinating dialogue between artists several centuries apart. The exhibition then opens on 15 October through 4 November at The Old Truman Brewery in London’s East End coinciding with Photomonth 2009.

The initiative, conceived during the last two years by Cynthia Corbett, Director of The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, will coincide with Frieze and Zoo 2009. Young Masters will also officially launch an Art Prize which will be continued by the Trafigura Foundation each year. The Art Prize, totaling £4,000, will be awarded to the most talented artist as judged by a panel of highly respected arts professionals. Young Masters is curated by Constance Slaughter and Beth Colocci and is supported by corporate sponsors Trafigura, AXA and Brakes Group.

The Cynthia Corbett Gallery, an international contemporary art gallery, represents emerging and newly established artists. corbettPROJECTS launched in 2004, focuses on curated solo and group installations, presenting an innovative programme of events in a diverse array of media including photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance art.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Trafigura knew of waste dangers

BBC Newsnight has uncovered evidence revealing that oil-trading company Trafigura knew that waste dumped in Ivory Coast in 2006 was hazardous.

Trafigura had persistently denied that the waste was harmful but internal e-mails show staff knew it was hazardous.

On Wednesday, Newsnight learned that Trafigura has offered to pay damages to settle a class action brought on behalf of 31,000 who said they were injured.

Up until now Trafigura has refused to settle, denying it was to blame.

The news of the settlement came as a UN report on claims that people had fallen sick or died as a result of the dump was published.

The report says there is "strong prima facie evidence that the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping of the waste from the cargo ship".

The chemical waste came from a ship called Probo Koala and in August 2006 truckload after truckload of it was illegally fly-tipped at 15 locations around Abidjan, the biggest city in Ivory Coast.

In the weeks that followed the dumping, tens of thousands of people reported a range of similar symptoms, including breathing problems, sickness and diarrhoea.

Refinery by-product

The story began four years ago at an oil refinery in Mexico, owned by the state company Pemex, or PMI.

This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars
Trafigura e-mail

In its chemical processes the refinery was producing a by-product - coker naptha, a dirty form of gasoline which could not be treated on site.

The e-mails which Newsnight has obtained reveal that Trafigura executives realised they could make a fortune by buying the dirty Mexican oil for next to nothing.

One e-mail says: "This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars."

However, to sell it on at a profit, Trafigura first had to find a cheap way to clean the coker naptha and lower its sulphur levels.

Difficulties

Trafigura chartered the Probo Koala and while the ship was off the coast of Gibraltar poured tons of caustic soda and a catalyst into the dirty oil to clean it - a rough and ready process known as "caustic washing".

Watch Newsnight's May 2009 investigation

The method is cheap, but it generates such dangerous waste that it is effectively banned in most places around the world.

The e-mails obtained by Newsnight show that in the months before the waste was dumped the company knew about the difficulties they would face in disposing of the waste.

"This operation is no longer allowed in the European Union, the United States and Singapore" it is "banned in most countries due to the 'hazardous nature of the waste'", one e-mail warns.

Another e-mail points out that "environmental agencies do not allow disposal of the toxic caustic".

The process left a toxic sulphurous sludge in the tanks of the Probo Koala.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Trafigura knew of waste dangers

Evidence seen by Newsnight shows that knowledge of the waste and problems getting rid of it went to the very top of Trafigura and the company's President Claude Dauphin.

The Trafigura e-mails say that Mr Dauphin was urging his team to "be creative" in how they dealt with the hazardous waste.

The contractor that they found in the end was Solomon Ugburogbu, the owner of a company called Tommy, which had no facilities to handle hazardous waste.

Ugburogbu, is now serving a 20 year sentence for poisoning local people.

The Poor Mouth: Trafigura - Corporate Criminals

Lord Strathclyde severs links with oil trader Trafigura after waste scandal - Worldnews.com

Lord Strathclyde, leader of Conservative party in the Lords. Photograph: David Mansell The leader of the Conservative party in the Lords, Lord Strathclyde, is to sever his links with the controversial traders Trafigura. Evidence was disclosed in the Guardian today that the London-based firm has carried out a huge cover-up of its role in an African -dumping scandal.

The Map as Art

2009-10-17T23:06:22+01:00

Princeton Architectural Press * The Map as Art

Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form.

Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints.

Katharine Harmon knows this territory. As the author of our best-selling book You Are Here, she has inspired legions of new devotees of imaginative maps. In The Map as Art, Harmon collects 360 colorful, map-related artistic visions by well-known artists—such as Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, Maira Kalman, William Kentridge, and Vik Muniz—and many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art. Essays by Gayle Clemans bring an in-depth look into the artists' maps of Joyce Kozloff, Landon Mackenzie, Ingrid Calame, Guillermo Kuitca, and Maya Lin. Together, the beautiful reproductions and telling commentary make this an essential volume for anyone open to exploring new paths.

So what is art school all about, anyway?

2009-10-16T19:32:21+01:00

Matthew Collings has a long and painfully honest piece about his time in art school and what it might all mean. It kicks off by pointing out that Damien Hirst is a terrible painter, but that's not the point of the piece. I found myself nodding along with his ramblings, though his experience was much different to mine (and about ten years earlier).

Saatchi Online - Blog On News, Views, Diaries, Photo-Journals

So, how do you study to become an artist? Is it boring or exciting to learn the rules? Can you only truly get anywhere if you break them, and if so why learn them in the first place? These questions were very urgent for me 30 years ago when I finished art school, but at the same time I didn't have any answers for them, and finding the uncertainty difficult to cope with I buried the problem. I covered it over with activity that bore a certain resemblance to living the life of an artist but in fact was pathological, an avoidance of facing life at all. I had a studio, I went there several days a week, I earned money to pay the rent and buy materials, and I often stretched up canvases and piled various marks on them, but I could never finish anything. I told people I was an artist -- I told myself the same thing. But in the studio there was never any stack of paintings, nothing ever built up. There were many starts but no finishes. And this went on year after year. I saw all sorts of shows, I wrote about them, I thought about them, I read all sorts of books, I was influenced by everything, I tried to re-do those things that I liked, kind of absorbing them, believing that somehow I always knew them, and that they were in fact "me," but after the first impulsive lunges I didn't know what to do next. I would come into the studio and start again, not knowing what on earth I was doing, and inevitably go nowhere.

Castles of Ulster

2009-10-13T09:56:56+01:00

I bought Jonathan Olley's book by chance at the Hay Festival this year. It's amazing, a tour de force if you like this sort of thing. Now he's showing in London, opening on wednesday.

www.lauraannnoble.com

Opening this week at Diemar/Noble:

Jonathan Olley, ‘Castles of Ulster’/’The Forbidden Forest’

Private View Wednesday 14th October, 6:30PM

Mark Leckey performance on the economics of the Long Tail

2009-09-30T09:54:07+01:00

Performance 5: Mark Leckey

Performance 5: Mark Leckey
In the Long Tail (2009)
Thursday, October 01 at 8:00PM

at Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St.
New York, NY 10002
Lower East Side; on corner of Pitt St.
J/M/Z or F to Delancey/Essex; B/D to Grand St.

The Museum of Modern Art presents Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey in conjunction with its Performance Exhibition Series. Part lecture, part monologue, part living sculpture, Leckey’s In the Long Tail (2009) considers 20th century broadcasting and takes on the 'long tail' theory of internet-based economics, while speaking from inside an installation that hovers between film set and 3-D manifesto. Performance 5: Mark Leckey is made possible by MoMA's Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.

The past is another country

2009-09-29T07:46:30+01:00

New Images: Berlin - Brandenburger Tor - February 1982

Jesus Help Me Find My Proper Place

2009-09-28T22:21:47+01:00

lucprice.com

Urban Hacking

2009-09-27T09:59:28+01:00

Paraflows: Home

paraflows 09 – Festival for Digital Art and Cultures
10. - 20. September 2009

Festival Opening / 10.09.2009, 7 pm
Container Installation, Karlsplatz/Resselpark,
Close-by Otto Wagner Pavillon, Straßenbahnhaltestelle Karlsplatz

The city of Vienna has a long tradition of interventions and actions in the public space. With this year’s topic URBAN HACKING, the fourth paraflows festival continues this artistic investigation of the public and urban space of living. What is more, paraflows 09 will shed light on the role played by digital media when it comes to exploring, questioning, and shaping the urban infrastructure.

Exhibition URBAN HACKING

A container village designed especially for paraflows at Karlsplatz will provide the space for the exhibition URBAN HACKING, which will connect the Künstlerhaus, the Karlskirche, and the project space, and thereby unite the historic with the contemporary. More than 30 national and international positions of digital art and cultures as well as the artistic strategies connected therewith shed light on current and older tendencies of interacting with the public space.What will be put on display are projects on use and intervention, on hacking and setting up the urban public. A focus will thereby be laid on the possibilities “urban hacking” offers for the redesign of public space.

The net, as public infrastructure with its individual elements, possibilities, and mechanisms, has become integral to social communication and extended the public space via hyperspace. How these two parallel layers of reality are organized and impact the individual’s freedom of movement is one of the questions to be answered by paraflows 09 URBAN HACKING.

Dayton Castleman build an F-16 out of cardboard

2009-09-24T18:40:35+01:00

Anyone builds anything out of cut up cardboard is ok in my book:

Matthews The Younger: Video for the Day

Watch Dayton Castleman build an F-16 out of cardboard.

HOLA

2009-09-24T16:19:50+01:00

hola_0725 web on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Of Human Bondage Tape

2009-09-24T11:28:58+01:00

from my friend's company, lovehoney.co.uk - who knew?

As seen in Tadao Ando's Church of the Light

2009-09-23T17:09:00+01:00

I always loved this building. It's just a shame that Ando never went on to do anything so perfect again. His large scale development work is, frankly, dull.

As seen in Tadao Ando's Church of the Light.

Dust to dust. As seen in Tadao Ando's Church of the Light.

Kandinsky's influence

2009-09-22T02:09:53+01:00

Kandinsky's influence

Pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) broke new ground in painting in the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal pre–World War I treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for developing an art independent of one’s observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well as his art, Kandinsky strove to use abstraction to give painting the freedom from nature that he admired in music. His discovery of a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” occupied him throughout his life. In Newsweek, Peter Plagens has put together a slideshow of artists who share Kandinsky's "aesthetic DNA." The list includes A-listers like Arshile Gorky, Willem De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Terry Winters, Elizabeth Murray, and Thomas Nozkowski, but also includes less well-known painters Heidi Pollard, Mark Mullin, and, well, Peter Plagens himself. Of course, the list could go on and on. A shorter list might include abstract painters who don't share Kandinsky's aesthetic DNA.

Artforum and strangulated vague congested references

2009-09-18T21:22:38+01:00

Matthew Collings does a monthly column for the Saatchi website, one of the few reasons to pay attention to it (another is that they unearth quite good shows on a regular basis). This month in PUT DOWNS AND SUCK UPS: MATTHEW COLLINGS' WEEKLY VENTINGS ABOUT THE ART WORLD NO 34: TOP TEN Collings takes a brilliant punt at Artforum. With it's "strangulated vague congested references to other writings that these over-verbal strivers have been intimidated by" he makes a point that I keep wanting to make -- we don't have a language to talk about contemporary art that most of us can understand. Yet, like so many of us, he concludes, "I must have something of the same sadomasochistic twitch because I keep buying it."

2. Artforum. Every time I buy this magazine it's depressing. I ask myself, what am I reading? The answer is strangulated vague congested references to other writings that these over-verbal strivers have been intimidated by. They want to pass on the unpleasantness. And yet I must have something of the same sadomasochistic twitch because I keep buying it. They used to have a regular feature called "Greil Marcus's Top Ten," written by the verbose rock writer, which was pretty pretentious, but sometimes funny. (When the Spice Girls toured America one of his entries read something like: "The Spice Girls US tour. Sure, but this bad?") He stopped doing it years ago and a different new or emerging artist is invited to do it each month instead. They list idiotic things they think might sound impressive and pretend they like them. At the front of the magazine there's always an introduction to the issue, where the editor pretends to be troubled by passing social issues. It's quite useful if you've got a bit of professional hustling to do in the art world and you want to know what the conversational reference points are for pseuds this month.