Baptism

photo: Irina Shteinberg

New performance by Andrey Kuzkin: washing glossy magazines at Fabrika in Moscow.

This has all the qualities of Kuzkin's recent work: simple (though not simplistic) concept, earnestness and bodily exertions, criticism of media/spectacle/commerce, allusions to conceptualism, this time through institutional critique, and a real attempt to break distance between artist & audience. Wish I'd been there. Wonder what happened to all the image/text-free magazines after it was all over... (Thanks for the tip, vk.)

See some other works. some

Around the World and Back Again

Tragic.

Just read that a fire has burned up much of the oeuvre of the amazing Brazilian conceptual artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Looks like some of it is restorable and the digital archive is almost complete, but still. This is beyond words.

Hélio Oiticica, Metaesquema No. 348, 1958. (MoMA)

Magic Cities

If J.M. Barrie were from Chicago...

People gettin' married!

Japanese Garden behind the Museum of Science & Industry

Promontory Point

where one did not swim, though one had wanted to

Train ride into Moscow, you had me at tree.

"A large, gratuitous waste of human potential."

Krugman lays it out on the current state of higher education in America. It is painful.

I don't have much to add. Other than to say that, like a blind, optimistic salmon (or a 60s pop icon), I'm going to continue swimming upstream while awishin' and ahopin', athinkin' and aprayin' that there will be a job for us all at the end of it all.

zen zen zen zen zen

Here are some pictures to distract you (me) from the horror vacui of the preceding.

Goodbye, summer.

Hello, academe.

All of the preceding were taken in Beacon, NY. Except the racoons, those are straight from the offices of the Ministry of Higher Education.

Psych!!! There's no such thing! That may account for something.

Oh yea, ps., welcome back.