Amy Goodwin

Linda photographed by

Andrew Bush

Jon Burgerman Pens are my Friends

I think a woman ought to have the final say on her body.
I think a woman should have the right to choose.
If you do not then read no further.

I wish I could take credit for this idea but I got it from a friend. 

An ingenious way to make a statement about Sarah Palin's positions on issues affecting 
all of us (not just women!) --specifically in this case the issues of choice, sex education 
and access to birth control. Here's the deal-make a $5 donation to Planned Parenthood. 
In honor of Sarah Palin. The best part is (1) it's tax-deductible and (2) PP will send
a card to Sarah Palin letting her know about your gift.

Support a good cause (a necessary cause---PP is fighting for so many important
services and issues) and send a message to the McCain/Palin campaign that you
think choice is important, health care for women is important, sex and health
education are important, etc.
Donating $5 never felt so good!

Just click this link
https://secure.ga0.org/02/pp10000_inhonor

And enter Sarah Palin's name and the address of the McCain/Palin campaign.
John McCain 2008
P.O. Box 16118
Arlington , VA 22215

no school today for the girlies

Light Bulbs by Dutch designer Pieke Bergman 

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Andy Warhol

what's with all the books?

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Times Art School: Leading artists reveal how they got started

Anya Gallaccio

Lion Tree

Bronze, green glaced porcelain, black rope

McCain's debate notes

thedailywhat

bye bye Paul

from designyoutrust

Tom Price 

Meltdown fleece

designboom

I like the work artist of Tara Donovan.

Using simple materials, repitition, and ingenuity she manufactures inspiring installations and objects.

I enjoyed this story in the NYTimes

After Ms. Donovan’s work was chosen for the 2000 Whitney Biennial, she moved back to New York, her hometown, and got a job waiting tables at Savoy, a SoHo restaurant where one lunchtime regular was the painter Chuck Close. She didn’t tell him that she was also an artist until she won a residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation studios in SoHo, where Mr. Close is on the board. Soon afterward she left Savoy to work on her first show at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, but the two stayed in touch.

styrofoam cups

mylar

In 2003 — several waitressing jobs later — Ace offered Ms. Donovan her first major New York show .

Mr. Close visited the show and came away an ardent fan. “I thought it was such an incredible alchemy that she had pulled off with these really simple materials that transcend their physical reality,” he said. “I dragged everybody I knew” to see it.

That included most of the top brass from his gallery, PaceWildenstein. Ms. Donovan joined the gallery two years later. Since then, she said, her life has changed considerably. 

Tara Donovan, 38, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award on Tuesday.

Her first major museum show opens on Oct. 10 at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

NY artist records public scorn on Wall Street

NEW YORK - When controversy looms on Wall Street, chances are that Geoffrey Raymond isn't far behind, magic markers in hand.

The 54-year-old Brooklyn artist has become a regular sight lately on the scene of big Wall Street fiascos, where he gives the public a chance to vent by scrawling comments on his oversized portraits of powerful corporate executives.

He spent Monday and Tuesday outside the Manhattan headquarters of Lehman Brothers, urging passers-by to sign his latest work, a painting of the investment bank's chief executive, Richard Fuld.

Sign they did. Bystanders filled the canvas from edge to edge with comments about greed and comeuppance.

"Blood suckers," read one.

"See you at the soup kitchen!!!" read another.

Lehman Brothers workers were invited to sign, too, as they entered and left the building. Their remarks, recorded in green ink, ranged from wistful to angry.

"What a day. What a year. What a firm," said one.

Another worker scrawled, "You are a coward," next to Fuld's visage.

Called, "The Annotated Fuld," the painting is the latest in a series that began when Raymond turned up outside the offices of Dow Jones & Co. last summer as the company and its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, were being sold to Rupert Murdoch.

Since then, Raymond has produced similar annotated works of Bear Stearns Chairman James Cayne and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was forced to resign after a prostitution scandal. He is already at work on a new painting of former American International Group chief Hank Greenberg.

DAVID B. CARUSO The Associated Press

apparently someone bought the "Fuld" painting off the street for $10,000

You can hear the story on NPR

link to Geoffrey Raymond

some paint I was working with today in the studio

The 72 room house.

great story

dancing on Frank Ghery's architecture

Good Morning.

I wish my tea bag was as clever as this one

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Aaron Sorkin conjures a meeting between Obama and Bartlet (the fictionalized democratic ex-president from the West Wing) Here is a small bit:

BARTLET : GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

the rest in the NYTimes

it is getting chilly

link

girleffect

The French artist Catherine Baÿ presents “The Snow White Project,” the 

opening event of the French Institute-Alliance Française’s Crossing the 

Line festival. The installation transports the character from the land of fairy 

tales to the fashionable meatpacking district.…

With her collection of Snow Whites, Ms. Baÿ conjures an anti-consumerism 

performance manifesto. On Tuesday the best part of the production came 

late, when the characters settled into the boutique’s second floor to play 

an intricately choreographed game of cards, all the while chugging 

Budweiser tall boys and crumpling copies of the program, which they 

then whipped at the audience — Lillet-swilling consumers of art.

NYTimes

The Onion is so hilarious

Obama's emails

Mauritian Sunset

Removing the people

No people, no animals, no movement. Spanish artist José Manuel Ballester (Madrid, 1960) cleared every living creatures from some of the most famous paintings from El Prado Museum. The result, a collection of disturbing desert landscapes, is now exhibited at a little gallery in Madrid.

a new invite for my studio building

it was fun to hand draw

Light drawings

link

new work from Pentagram

Drill, Drill, Drill

  I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one.  Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

  I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

  But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

  I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world.  Unfortunately, this is not a joke.  In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

  Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan.  She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, 'It was a task from God.'

  Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

  She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.
 

  Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

  Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

  Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

  I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society, or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

  If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected, then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, 'Drill Drill Drill.' I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent.  I think of pain.

  Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008 

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for 'The Vagina Monologues'.
 

The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire view Marc Quinn's sculpture of a baby entitled Planet

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Matt Hoyle’s Mistman

Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- 

Damien Hirst's auction at Sotheby's, London, marks a brilliant and radical innovation. The breakthrough isn't, of course, in the art on view. The novelty lies in the method of sale. 

Nobody, as far as I know, has ever brought to the saleroom a large batch of new work directly from the studio, or multiple fabrication locations, in Hirst's case. It misses out a whole stage in the conventional game -- the dealer's role.

In today's NYTimes there is an article about Maurice Sendak . 

A quote I particularly liked: -

So he spends his days pondering his heroes: Mozart, Keats, Blake, Melville and Dickinson. He admires and yearns for their “ability to be private, the ability to be alone, the ability to follow some spiritual course not written down by anybody." 

  

Normally I cringe when I hear celebrities talking about anything serious or political.

I thought this was an exception. Pit Bull with Lipstick against Putin?

Silliness for the day 

My mind is still in summer mode