Everytime I do some perfectly innocent search through flickr (in this case the word used was “DUH”) I get the unconnected weirdness.
Saturday Random Flickr Pics, the “In honor of Habeas Corpus” dub
Saturday, October 14th, 2006Your fingerpainting reminds me of death, Janie. Can’t you just recite important dates in US history like a good little girl?
Friday, September 22nd, 2006Mixing Memory recently discussed some social psych experiments regarding Terror Management Theory and the impact of high “mortality salience,” i.e. awareness of one’s own mortality, on a person’s perceptions. Politically, high mortality salience was linked to supporting Bush and conservatism:
In what is probably the most famous set of TMT experiments, Landau et al.2 first showed that priming participants with thoughts of death (as opposed to a neutral control topic) made them more supportive of President Bush. Then, after an experiment showing that thinking of the September 11 attacks increased mortality salience, they showed that thinking of the September 11 attacks also increased support of Bush. In a follow-up study3, Cohen et al. showed that during the 2004 presidential campaign, participants whose mortality salience was high (through a manipulation similar to that in the Landau et al. experiment) were much more likely to say they would vote for Bush than Kerry, while participants in the control condition were much more likely to vote for Kerry than Bush. Apparently, mortality salience makes us more supportive of authority figures, and perhaps a bit more politically conservative as well.
The constant fear of terrorism may appeal to people with a naturally high awareness/fear of their own death, or perhaps that awareness/fear was permanently hiked by coming to believe we could be hit again at any moment. Chicken or egg, a strong mortality salience appears to play a part in causing someone to lean right in the present climate. Since those with lower mortality salience lean left, it may also be safe to assume that most wingnuts would have to have high MS to remain so staunchly conservative these days. Folks who exhibited those qualities also tended to prefer more structure, not less.
TMT studies also focused on the perception of objects without context. For example, when subjects were asked to consider death-related topics before looking at a Jackson Pollack painting with a name like “#12,” they were much less likely to feel positively about the painting than those who viewed it with a more substantive name. The name gave the abstract painting some context, and thus the subjects were a little less likely to project their mortality fears onto it. Without that context, they tended to imbue it with their own negative thoughts.
Belated Monday Poetry: On Seeing Larry Rivers’ “Washington Crossing The Delaware” At The Museum Of Modern Art
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006By Frank O’Hara
click picture to embiggen
Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.
To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding
on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they’re smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate’s flag, bravely specific
and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don’t shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.
Art for the masses
Monday, July 31st, 2006I want buying my paintings to be like buying a CD: it’s cheap, it’s art and it changes your life, but the object has no status. Musicians create something for the moment, something with no boundaries and that kind of expansiveness is what I want to come across in my work.
And he isn’t kidding. According to a NYT article from last year, Keene churns out 60-80 paintings a day and he estimates he has sold more than 170,000 in the last 15 years.
My new(est) apartment has a lot more wall space than I’m used to, and I had put off the acquisition of something worthy to cover it all up, largely because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to look at day after day. Cue a fortuitous find by friend and reader Carrie in the form of Steve Keene.
Carrie went to Steve’s site and ordered a single painting for $12 plus $8 shipping. When you order from Steve Keene, you don’t get to choose the painting, just the size. And for that price, who can complain when it comes to original art? After a few weeks, Carrie received her order. Much to her surprise, it included several paintings, not just the one she ordered. For $20 she had received a whole wall of art.
After she gave me an extra (he had included 2 painted renditions of OK Computer’s cover), I figured this was the answer to my empty wall’s prayers. I ordered a large and a small painting for $20 total plus $9 shipping, curious to see how many paintings I might get. A few weeks later, I received these 10:
So for $30 I got 10 original pieces of art, and they aren’t tiny, either; the smalls are 12×12, and the larges are 16×20. I love some of the paintings more than others, sure, but I think they all work together quite well. They bring the whole room to life.
If you have some wallspace to fill, I heartily encourage you to send $20 Steve’s way. His vibrant populist art may be one of the best deals in America.
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