Oh, it worked okay on my desktop and iPod alike!

Is that better now?

That worked, will delete these two comments now.

"n contrast to the stale rooms of paintings and sculpture elsewhere,"

you've made it pretty clear where you stand on the so-called "traditional arts" in earlier posts, like the one comparing a video of a dirty sink with Michelangelo's David, and here you are at it again, the attack on traditional media, and the elevation of conceptual, contectual art as so avant and 21st century.

Do you think painting and sculpture are dead and shouldn't be pursued any more?
Do you believe in the avant-garde?
Do you feel like a revolutionary?

Whatever now is avant-garde - if such a thing is even possible in this postmodern age - it sure as hell isn't conceptual art, which has been around since Duchamp, has been dominant since the 60s, and became truly establishment in the early 90s with the YBAs. Once again, Momus talks the "make it new" talk, but ultimately sides with the hipster conformists.

"He seems to think that Relational Aesthetics is old hat because it's been going for five years, but painting isn't because it's been going for five hundred."

Momus on art critic Brian Sewell

There's a qualitative difference between something that's been going for five years and something that's been going for almost a hundred. Anyone with even the most tangential interest in art will have heard of Duchamp's urinal. Anyone with even the vaguest intellectual curiosity will be able to conjure up images of dead sharks in tanks or Emin's unmade bed. Conceptual art is what the man on the Clapham omnibus thinks contemporary art is, whether he likes it or not. It's the art that the big establishment galleries and big establishment art prizes are all about. It is deeply, deeply mainstream now, within middle class culture. I'm not saying there isn't interesting stuff going on there, but as an art genre, it's as conventional as painting ever was.

Uli should make that piece into a website. It would be fun to click through.

Her website is quite extensive, check it out! I'd think her Retrozoology piece would be right up your neck of the woods! Unfortunately I couldn't get the audio samples to play...

Hah. Well, there goes a couple hours...

Oh, good, because I was getting worried you were running out of fangirls.

lol dear old Bowie, the only serious musician in the world, ever.

Thought you might like this, which I recently got to see in Madrid's patio maravillas, a squat-cultural centre :

"The project “THEM” by Artur Zmijewski (Warsaw, 1966) is a social experiment he produced in a workshop with members of different (and opposed) organisations from Poland (Conservatives: Patriotic Catholics, and the Polish Nationalist Youth. Left-wing socialists: Democrats and Freedom Fighters…). Each one of them was asked to represent itself with a symbol they were supposed to present on a canvas, allowing the other organisations to intervene on it. The piece shows the process of creation and intervention of the different ideological symbols and the (aesthetic and political) negotiations and discussions of the participants."

I was aiming to post a link to it on youtube, seems to have been removed though....

Before the film, a talk was given by Ayse Gueleç, Head of Inter-Culturality and Learning at the Kultur Zentrum Schlachthof in Kassel. She descibed the issues involved in a cultural space which is really a part of the local community - run by the people with the people, through local networks and associations representing a wide spectrum of the population. The schlachthof is described as 'as a truly public space, where diverse collectives and cultural communities could converge and offer educational, exhibitive, and art mediation activities.'. http://www.liquidaciontotal.org/al_matadero.htm

....Now there's an encouraging contemporary art project guaranteed to lift cynicism, IMHO!