Is it art or vandalism? Love or rape?

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1617642007

Exhibit A is an approximately white canvas, one panel of a triptych, which many would consider artless, even if they were willing to concede its value as conceptual art.

Exhibit B, the "after" shot, shows the same painting with a large lipstick smudge painted by artist Rindy Sam. Her modification is arguably artful; I don't know enough about painting to judge it on formal or technical grounds, but certainly one could admit her gesture of audacious intervention in a heterotopic space is consistent with the field of 20th century conceptual art.

She called this an act of love, and said she thought the artist would've understood. Perhaps she was thinking of Marcel Duchamp, who is reputed to have claimed that his painting on glass "The Bride Stripped Bare..." was improved when it was cracked as a result of being accidentally dropped in transit to an exhibition. Or of Man Ray, who, when someone took him up on the challenge implied in the title of his sculpture "Object to be Destroyed," cheerfully made another.

As far as I've been able to learn, Twombly has made no comment on this case. Sam is being punished/published by the French government (who proposes to rehabilitate her into a model citizen by means of civility classes) and sued by the owner for more than the estimated value of the painting.

I imagine, though, that that value is now a moving target. She has probably increased it significantly by drawing international attention. I certainly hadn't heard of it before yesterday, or I would have cited it in my master's thesis -- the title of the triptych, "Phaedrus" references Plato's dialogue in which Socrates decries writing as a secondary, empty form of communication that can never simulate the presence of speech. (Really, wasn't Twombly inviting this response, at least on the level of fantasy?)

I think the owner should play this up as much as he can for the next few weeks, and then sell the painting, drop the law suit, and split the profits with Sam. (Maybe that's what they'd planned all along?) And if he's so enamored of the unmodified painting, he can commission Twombly to paint him another. Should take all of 5 minutes, so how expensive can it be?

Found sound hound bounds around town; rewound ground mounds resound & astound.

There's something beautifully obsessive about HarSmedia's Found Tapes exhibit. Seeking (or happening upon) discarded bits of weathered tape lying in streets, cleaning them up, spooling them, and playing them back to hear the sound of gems dropped casually to the concrete. Tracking, describing, photographing and Google-mapping the exact locations of the discoveries.

The resulting montage is a delightful listen -- more diverse than any radio station you could dream of (containing music from all over the world, and all up and down the scale from professionally recorded performances to answering machine messages), and somehow the lo-fi quality and jarring edits only add to the fascination.

Like sweet sugar bombs for my ADHD aesthetic sensibilities.

New primary color discovered

http://www.negativland.com/squant/
Actually, this must have been discovered some time ago since the tech support page makes reference to Apple System 8.1. Anyway, once they get over the rather daunting infrastructural hurdles, this should have enormous implications for cultural production into the future.