Neon Text Installations (by Lee Jung)
Sometimes I'm interesting
Yo-Yo Ma Has 'Three Big Ideas' About The Future Of The Arts
1. Societies are powered by three engines: politics, economics and culture. A vibrant society exists when all three engines are firing and intersecting, resulting in a populace that is energized, engaged and fulfilled.
2. Our collective work in the arts is not just relevant, but essential to strengthening our culture and positively influencing society. Thus: “Art for Life’s Sake.”
3. The arts are the way to foster the four critical skills necessary for our children to succeed in the 21st-century workforce: collaboration, flexibility, imagination, innovation
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- The 7 Worst International Aid Ideas (via stfuconservatives)
Further, though, the TOMS campaign — like the million shirts — misses the fundamental point that not having a pair of shoes (or a shirt, christmas toy, etc.) is not a problem about not having shoes. It’s a problem of poverty. Shoelessness, such as it is, is a symptom of a much bigger and more complex problem. And while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty.
Things like jobs help poverty. Jobs making things like shoes, for example. But TOMS doesn’t make its shoes in Africa, it makes them in China where it’s presumably cheaper to make two pairs of shoes and give one away than it is to get people in a needier community to make one pair of shoes.
The result of this setup, as Zizek explains most succinctly, is that on a big-picture level, TOMS (and other buy-my-product-and-donate companies) are busy building the exploitative global structure that produces economic inequality, while on the other hand pretending that supporting them actually does something to fix it.
It doesn’t. It just gives people shoes.
❞- The 7 Worst International Aid Ideas (via stfuconservatives)
David Maisel - Library of Dust (2008)
“In 1913, the Oregon State Insane Asylum began to cremate the remains of unclaimed patients and their ashes were stored in copper canisters.
After decades in storage the canisters have undergone chemical reactions resulting in explosions of vivid blue-green corrosion. Maisel was granted access to the room in which the canisters were stored to document them for his book.”
Artist’s statement:
“Among my concerns with Library of Dust are the crises of representation that derive from attempts to index or archive the evidence of trauma; the uncanny ability of objects to portray such trauma; and the revelatory possibilities inherent in images of such traumatic disturbances.
While there are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time, the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and to the souls that occupy them.”
