Urs Fischer at the New Museum

He's taking the whole place over, at monumental effort and expense. "The great thing about art," says the curator, "is that the result should not be proportional to the effort."

Check it out at The WSJ; it actually sounds like a great exhibition.

"Dreadful" Hirst Paintings Draw Record Crowds

Per The Telegraph, the exhibition, No Love Lost, Blue Paintings, a collection of 25 new paintings by Hirst at The Wallace Collection, is expected to draw more than twice the museum's previous record. The show has been described by critics as "deadly dull and amateurish", "dreadful" and "not worth looking at".

Of course that makes me want badly to like them.

"Hirst . . . has said that he now wishes to be recognised as a 'painter... above either artist or sculptor' and recently admitted that 'paintings are easier to shift – even in a recession people like paintings'."

Slideshow here.

Concert & Exhibition at Bitforms: Tristan Perich

1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements that "explores the polyphonic potential of audio reduced to binary form." It "literally 'performs' its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit – programmed by the artist and packaged into a standard CD jewel case – plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself."

"By reducing sound into primary units of digital measure, Perich's musical compositions offer critique to overly produced and recorded media. Rather than use data to produce a representation of analogue phenomena, raw electrical pulses in these works create pitch and rhythm when played through a speaker-creating music that is, at its essence, electronic."

"Perich's visual compositions also explore texture, noise and order using recursive logic. Woven from geometric structures, his drawings contain layers of choreographed linear repetition. Executed with a pen connected to a machine, line in these images gives way to densely packed surfaces and planes."

As part of the show, a "pre-premiere" of Dual Synthesis for harpsichord and 1-bit electronics will take place in a benefit concert, Oct. 27, 6:30 PM. $100; tickets here. Exhibition Oct. 28 - Nov. 7, 200; all at bitforms, 529 W. 20th St., 2d flr.

What to Do on a Date

Now I see what I was doing wrong.

Wall of Toilets

Couldn't resist this. Per boingboing, it was part of a "ceramics festival" in China. (Thanks, Ben!)

Anonymous asks, and the wall of toilet paper is where . . . ?

Dept. of FB Apps

Should you have the right to know who commissioned the creation of the Facebook quizzes you take? At All Facebook, you can't see who commissioned them, but at least you can see which developer made them – except that in some cases, even that info's left blank. E.g., "Who is your one true love," "How annoying are you," "Which member of the 'Scooby Doo' gang are you?," "Do you know yourself [in German]," etc.

I heard the gummint has a Dept. . . . . (just kidding; but I wouldn't rule it out).

Views You Can Use from Assume Vivid Astro Focus

From a show at the National Museum Oslo, 2008:



Love the backing-into-things part.

Action Alert: Join Artists in Demo for Health Insurance Reform

PAC-WE is organizing an artists' performance action Sun., Oct. 25, 11am - noon at the Morton Meyerson Symphony Hall, Dallas, TX, and you're invited! Just bring yourself and your friends; everything else will be supplied. More details here or in my previous post, here.

Click on the image, right, for a larger version. Even larger version (for printing posters or flyers) available here.

And tell your friends!

To get you in the mood, here's a video created by Ben Jones of Paper Rad to celebrate Pac-Man's 25th anniversary and the launch of the Pac-Man Inspired Music Series: