What sort of people do you want to follow? I follow pop science, UK politics (plus a few Americans) and cricket. You probably don't want this stuff. Decide on a few themes and pick some representative people. Knowing no better I think I started with the front pagers from CT and worked out from there. What's your handle?
I don't have a Twitter account, so I don't actually follow anyone, but I find it entertaining that Twitter is the only way I can find out where in the world my boss is on any given day.
LizrdBreath. And pop science sounds good -- it wouldn't have occurred to me offhand, but who do you follow there?
I mostly follow people I sort of know from online -- various Unfogged, CT and UK bloggy types -- and a bunch of real life friends/muso-mates. Plus a few authors and UK twitter types (e.g. Grace Dent).
3. SciNewsBlog (Science News); ScienceGoddess (Joanne Manaster) and BoraZ (Bora Zivkovic) who run Scientific American's blog presence; ProfBrianCox; hrynshyn (James Hrynshyn, science writer); TetZoo (Darren Naish, tetrapod blogger extraordinaire); Human Origins (Smithsonian)... It's a pretty eclectic bunch, and I add other people as I come across them.
Also, what ttaM says at 4. A lot of people from here are also there. You need to follow Dsquareddigest.
6. Nor I. I've followed Lizrd_breth until further notice. If that turns out to be a pr0n site I hope it's a good one.
Ditto to 6. And the one in 7 looks wrong?
Katherine. Emerson. In addition to the folks mentioned previously.
LB: Tweet "Hello" to me @chrisyoungsheff and I'll see what it appears as.
Nope, misspelled it the first time. Now I think I have.
Retweeted to anybody following me (both of you).
William Gibson is a fun twitterer.
So what does my ID show up as? It still looks like LizrdBreath from here.
And from here. I think it must have taken a while to putter through the system.
Katherine. Emerson.
These seem like good suggestions, but how would one go about locating them?
The list of people I follow is the easiest place to look!
11/12: the exclamation point was a nice touch--you're adopting twitter syntax already.
19: If you click on somebody, you will open their profile. The profile has a life of who they are followed by and who they follow.
Hah. I just raided your list of followings for everyone who looked interesting. I suppose that's how everyone does it.
And now that I'm signed up, the conversation about Twitter makes more sense.
Something I'm not quite getting -- when I follow someone, I get tweets from people I'm not following who seem to be engaging with that person. Am I seeing tweets with @[personI'mfollowing] in them? Because that would make sense, but I'm not actually seeing the @name in the extra tweets.
25: They are being retweeted by someone you are following. It is probably the @person doing the retweeting, but it could be someone else. On my phone, the retweeter is in small letters below the main body.
25: Is it something 'retweeted' by someone you are following? You'd see a little rectangle with arrows and then "by [name of person you are following]".
Oh, those must be retweets, maybe?
Unfogged: Adding value for readers who want to watch someone figure out social media several years late.
I have to say, I'm on day 2 of this experiment and I'm signed on since it's still a novelty, but it still doesn't seem like something I'm going to be interested in checking much long term. I'm going to give it some more time, though.
I still maintain that twitter is nothing different than Instapundit, only written by people you like instead of Glenn Reynolds.
Maybe I should tweet that.
I'm still planning to never use Twitter. Although my threats to delete my Facebook account remain idle.
I blame all of you if Twitter isn't fun. I do kind of suspect that Twitter is why blogs are less interesting over the last couple of years, but will nonetheless fail to amuse me in the same way. Not that I have any basis for the last bit of that yet.
Twitter is geocities except nobody knows what the actual mature system will look like.
The profile has a life of who they are followed by and who they follow.
I like to believe that my life is defined by much more than that.
But I decided to give it a try this morning as well (@MisterBlandings).
but it still doesn't seem like something I'm going to be interested in checking much long term.
As I said yesterday, it comes into its own from time to time, like following the Greek not-coup in real time. I wouldn't advise sitting in front of it all day every day.
31 -- You should. I think that's a fair point, but you have to add one more element: item selection criteria. Instapundit selects items (I thought, last time I looked in 2004 or so) because they show his ideological adversaries in a bad light. Blake Hounshell selects items because they show what is going on in the Middle East.
I want fewer links, and more snark. Kotsko seems to have been a good suggestion. More like that, please.
Anyway, my twitter feed is a mash of local issues that might actually affect me mixed with whatever Adam K. does while he takes the bus into work. It's not without uses.
33: I don't find it fun. I seldom check it.
36 -- Arab spring, Libya were good. Yemen. If you're interested in what's going on there. You have to find people who are articulate users who care a lot about some thing you care at least a little about.
38 -- Be the change, man, be the change.
I wouldn't advise sitting in front of it all day every day.
Goddammit, well then where's my Entertainment?
Goddammit, well then where's my Entertainment?
urple, are we allowed to friend you since you're all real-namey? I wanted to leave well enough alone if that's your preference but then you keep talking about twitter.
"Add" not "friend," I suppose since this is twitter.
The only twitter feed I know about is feministhulk.
What Charley said. It's a terrible medium for conversation (which really isn't the point of it) but I find that it's excellent for discovering interesting links, tweeted by people I follow. It's sort of my news aggregator.
I follow a bunch of middle east journalists and activists, which is good for finding out what's happening while it's happening.
Also, there's a guy called bad_banana whose one-liners are absolutely hysterical.
Redfox and Thorn are good. On Twitter, too.
45: sure. The... handle? id? login?... was probably a mistake, but whatever. I signed up a few years ago, before I really understood the concept.
Please, I don't want to join Twitter?
If I put "@[name]" somewhere in a tweet, am I understanding correctly that tweet will show up in [name]'s twitstream, even if [name] is not following me?
Twitter's great for live sporting events. I have an account but pretty much only follow soccer bloggers; the live commentary during big matches is fun when I'm watching by myself at home.
54: No, it will show up in their "@Mentions" stream if you're not following them. Which I often forget to check for months on end.
Interesting folks I follow: Atul Gawande, Brad Plumer, Tim Burke, TNC, Adam Serwer, Rachel Maddow, Stephen Fry, Dani Rodrik, a bunch of cartoonists. I also just started reading RealTimeWWII, headlines and news selections from this date in 1939.
52: I'm with you in the retrogrouch camp. Just say no. If we hang on for just a couple of years there will be a new Big Thing and everyone will forget about twitspacebook+ or whatever the hell it is kids are using these days.
Sockington and Feminist Hulk. (Though Feminist Hulk begins to pall eventually.)
The idea of having my text message box on my phone become flooded with stuff to read is horrifying to me. This stuff all sounds interesting, and I suppose I could just do the website version, but then it's one more website to check. I must be missing something about how this plays out in practice.
Jason Scott doesn't even own Sockington any more.
60: I have an app on my phone -- I don't think I'd ever see a tweet unless I opened the app. So, ignorable.
I can't tell whether the fact that I know the names in 54 mean that we are in the same circles, or if it means what I came to fear in blog reading days: that there are only a few hundred intriguing and verbal people out there writing about the things I'm interested in. A few thousand, if you want to read niche stuff. But really, in a world this big, not that many.
(Yes, of course, there are the geniuses who don't have access or interest, and the geniuses who don't work in words. But still.)
I hate the fact that I can't tell where any of the links go without clicking them.
61: What? Is Sockington dead? Or did Jason Scott just sell the rights to the Sockington Twitter feed? Or what?
what I came to fear in blog reading days: that there are only a few hundred intriguing and verbal people out there writing about the things I'm interested in
I don't know all the names in that comment, but most of the ones I do are people who write/report for a living, and it doesn't surprise me that there are that few people writing at that level professionally. Of course there are thousands of other people who are knowledgable and verbal and could write about interesting things. So I'm not sure I understand what the fear is. That there aren't as many expert, professional writers as one would like there to be?
I think it's that opening up your reading to the whole world of amateur writers/bloggers/twitterers, not all that many non-professional names float to the top -- there doesn't seem to be an untapped universe of fascinating content out there once you're not limited by only having access to professional media.
On twitter I just like the flow of glib/snark mixed with interesting links and comments. It doesn't have to be LRB style weighty text for me to find something interesting/useful.
Yeah, what LB said. A couple years after I started reading blogs, I stopped seeing new interesting ones, and I was only reading tens of blogs, not thousands. Which, given that there are millions of people who write in English and have access, doesn't seem like enough. I'd like there to be more better thinkers (granting that there are fascinating people who aren't verbal).
The cartoonists I follow are often test-driving new bon mots and being funny in general, but that's probably only bearable I'd you like their work to begin with. Two amateur standup comedians you might follow: HamptonYount, aparnapkin.
On twitter I just like the flow of glib/snark mixed with interesting links and comments.
No offense, but I think this means your brain is atrophying.
I'm pretty sure mine is. Something in the last year or so, I've lost my attention span for anything even a little complicated. I either have a brain tumor, I'm senile, or there's something else going on.
Something in that last comment should be sometime. But that's not a symptom of the atrophying, I always typed like that.
re: 73
I do also actually read weightier stuff -- subscribe to various things like the afore-mentioned LRB, read actual on-paper books. When I'm sitting at work or on the train, twitter is an OK thing to have burbling along somewhere in the background.
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I'm going to be in DC over the weekend... anyone want to meet up on Saturday night?
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Also to 69: Even if you add in the professional names, it still seems like you're talking about hundreds or thousands of people, which isn't a lot.
re: 74
Although the reduced concentration span thing is, somewhat, true that's as much a function, I think, of less long stretches of time earmarked for that sort of stuff. It's not as if it's that long ago that I finished my graduate studies, which was nothing if not about the concentration span.
Oh, and urple, it's easy to change your name on twitter. I've never done it, but people do it all the time. Everything else stays the same but the account name changes.
granting that there are fascinating people who aren't verbal
I like to think so.
69: The number of people producing fantastic content would probably go up if they were being payed for it, and didn't have to grind their souls down in day jobs.
65-67: pet divvying upon relationship's end.
I think that 69.2 and 63 are false. Many people with something worthwhile to say are either sporadic, or stop working after they've said their piece or done what the medium affords. Actually, Megan, your blog and its lifespan, isn't that a counterexample too?
It takes work to find them.
I guess I will make an ID, then recast this into 140 chars and add the following links of amateur blogs that I really liked to twitter. Most stopped when they had run their course, none became "famous" as far as I could tell.
http://equityprivate.typepad.com/
http://resobscura.blogspot.com/
http://www.spamula.net/blog/
http://www.outerlife.com/
Equity Private shows up on Zero Hedge sometimes.
86: eh, in the breach not so much. The people involved are I think much happier, and the cats are probably fine.
I think it's that opening up your reading to the whole world of amateur writers/bloggers/twitterers, not all that many non-professional names float to the top -- there doesn't seem to be an untapped universe of fascinating content out there once you're not limited by only having access to professional media.
Depends. This is totally not true with respect to the soccer/football bloggers I follow; it's actually kind of a golden age. What *has* happened is that the professional news organizations have gotten much smarter about talent scouting on the 'net, so a bunch of people who were, only a couple of years ago, amateurs are now being paid to write.
63 and 71 aren't making a lot of sense to me:
A couple years after I started reading blogs, I stopped seeing new interesting ones, and I was only reading tens of blogs, not thousands. Which, given that there are millions of people who write in English and have access, doesn't seem like enough. I'd like there to be more better thinkers
Isn't this quite possibly because one tends to start in a couple of places and branch out into places with a family resemblance (blogrolled or linked or mentioned by the first places), so that eventually you've checked out a lot of that family? Hence "I stopped seeing new interesting ones." If you start over again in an entirely different area, there are likely to be families of well-done blogs there as well, though it may be that, per 63, they're not writing things that are interesting to you. I don't see how you'd conclude from this that there's not much fascinating content out there.
What *has* happened is that the professional news organizations have gotten much smarter about talent scouting on the 'net, so a bunch of people who were, only a couple of years ago, amateurs are now being paid to write.
Yeah, I think Michael Cox's website was only a few months old by the time the Guardian started contracting pieces from him.
It doesn't have to be LRB style weighty text for me to find something interesting/useful.
Twitter's character limit is, sadly, just a little too limiting for LRB style snarky personal ads.
The sort of link which rewards the odd half hour on Twitter, if you like snark. Actually it's beyond snark, it's outright abuse. Still.
I'd like there to be more better thinkers (granting that there are fascinating people who aren't verbal).
I'm still not getting this. Why would the good thinkers, even the ones who are verbal, necessarily be producing internet content, blogs or otherwise? Why would there be an untapped universe of fascinating content out there once you're not limited by only having access to professional media ? (That forumlation from LB.)
With the advent of twitter, we saw a forumlation away from blogs.
Megan presumably means fascinating thinkers who produce internet content, preferably via blog or twitter stream.
But no, I don't really get the thought process either: it seems close to supposing that if you yourself haven't found it on blogs or twitter, I guess it's not there.
there doesn't seem to be an untapped universe of fascinating content out there once you're not limited by only having access to professional media.
Perhaps this is because, generally speaking, people want to be paid for producing good content. At least over time.
It really is. I had no idea two-spaces-after-a-period was viewed as wrong until quite recently, and then was awfully surprised that there were people with strong opinions about it. And now I have no idea at all where the strong opinions come from.
I use twitter mostly for comedy. @johnmoe, @jennyjohnsonHi5, @meganamram, @BorowitzReport are all masters of the form. @yokoono is too, in her fashion.
Huh, 96 confuses me. I had always heard that, yes, monospaced fonts were the inspiration for the two-space rule on typewriters, but that was because the lack of kerning meant that you couldn't automatically typeset the larger space after the peroid. Once postrcript gained wide acceptance it was possible to reimplement the traditional wide-but-not-two-spaces-wide gap, and thus there was no longer a need for two spaces.
I'm not sure why you should be confused by 96, Sifu, since it seems to address what one has always heard.
96 is claiming that wordprocessors don't, in fact, do that automatically. Which to me they don't look like they do -- one space after a period looks like the same one space as between words.
I helped draft the style guide used here at my job, and kept two spaces after a period because I prefer the way it looks. Win! The after-the-fact rationalization I use is that it distinguishes periods used as full stops from those used in abbreviations.
However, people who don't use serial commas should be tied up and beaten.
I always use two spaces after a period. I think the journal publication people change it on me.
If using two spaces is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Well, it confuses me that there is a controversy, and further confuses me that people think that the lack of a need to physically type two spaces after a period means that the space after the period should be the same width as a normal space. It does not confuse me to learn that spaces after periods were typically somewhat larger than usual, but it does surprise and confuse me to learn that modern fonts don't have kerning hints along these lines, instead using uniform spacing. So there are a lot of various confusions involved, but the overall gist -- that I'm right, and have been right all along -- seems basically comprehensible.
I learned how to type on an IBM Selectric and fail to see why I should have to adjust to all this new shit with fonts that have different sizes for different letters.
109: as does the unfogged server.
109: as does the unfogged server.
Not at all. If anything's to blame, it's HTML. The server takes no stand on this.
you'll hear some advocates for single-spacing talking about how modern fonts can take into account the extra spacing needed to the period in the font itself. But this is also an elaborate lie. Such kerning after periods would require sensitivity to abbreviations versus ends of sentences, something no font can do by itself. (Some publishing software and word processors do try.) Besides, I've seen no evidence that most professional fonts actually incorporate kerning pairs involving periods and spaces--in fact, it would be ridiculous to do such a thing, because it would interfere with the spacing adjustments that typographers still do.
There are so many ways to have been right all along. Some seem, yes, like having been wrong all along. Look more closely!
114: You'd think he'd know that.
I keep a big bag of extra spaces. HTML can't tell me how to separate my sentences. I've got its number.
Time to join the Occupy the Space After the Period protests. Although if the space after the period is occupied, then it's not really space anymore. Which kinda defeats the purpose.
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After the event, Warren reflected on the man's outburst, which she said was her first such encounter. "I actually felt sorry for the guy. I really genuinely did. He's been out of work now for a year and a half. And bless his heart, I mean, he thought somehow it would help to come here and yell names," she told HuffPost.
Elizabeth Warren knows how to handle a troll.
|>
116: it's confusing having been right all along.
111: "Well, it confuses me that there is a controversy..."
It's totally unimportant to me that there's a controversy. The two spaces after a period are a firm muscle memory and not under conscious control. If one needs to be removed the software can do it. Or the software can go fuck itself, I don't care either way.
LaTeX puts more space after a period, which is why you sometimes have to give it a hint when you use an abbreviation followed by a capital letter, so it knows to use a normal space.
Yesterday I got to out-pedant my most pedantic collaborator by changing all of his en-dashes to em-dashes or colons. Hooray for tiny victories.
96 was interesting, and I say that as an editor who personally only uses a single space after a period.
108
However, people who don't use serial commas should be tied up and beaten.
This made me finally get out the style guide relevant to my job, and, ouch, it seems I should start using serial commas. I'll try to remember that. I blame my failure to do so thus far on the fact that my previous job used the AP Stylebook.
I don't care whether producers are paid or not, am happy if they are. What I do care is that when someone asks for new interesting people to follow, I don't see much I haven't seen. Further, the total number of interesting thinkers seems to be in the hundreds (and if I'm wrong, that's great, but this thread isn't flushing hundreds of interesting twitter users. We're talking dozens of people here.) Thousands if you get niche blogs, which I myself am fond of. But that still isn't very many people and given that the barriers to entry aren't high, it distresses me.
If you start over again in an entirely different area, there are likely to be families of well-done blogs there as well
But this keeps not happening (not that I don't search). That's my point. Notice that it hasn't happened in this very thread.
I can't figure out what you're talking about, Megan. The barriers to creating a thoughtful, popular blog on substantive topics are in fact quite high indeed. Given that the vast majority of people have no interest in starting a blog in the first place -- that is, they don't read them, they don't care about them, and they have no interest in disseminating ideas that way -- the fact that the number of people who are simultaneously interested, motivated, thoughtful, and willing or able to put in the necessary time and attention is not terribly large seems beyond unsurprising.
given that the barriers to entry aren't high
Seriously? It's a big time suck to keep up an interesting blog or even twitter feed. It doesn't matter to you whether producers are paid, but it likely does matter to the potential writers whose time we're talking about here.
Lack of interest is surely the biggest barrier. But given that, and all the other non-verbal ways that people are bright, even so, it seems like tens or hundreds of good content generators is too few for a population of hundreds of millions.
And I'm off to lunch.
even so, it seems like tens or hundreds of good content generators is too few for a population of hundreds of millions.
It seems so unlikely that my own conclusion would be that I just hadn't found the other good content providers yet.
But a lot will depend on what you count as a good/interesting content provider, won't it?
But this keeps not happening (not that I don't search).
Kelvin said that there were no more discoveries to be made. Maybe there are other ways to search?
I think that it's come up that people here are basically disinterested in visual art (the name a living painter thread), and generally not interested in hard sciences. Where are you looking for good blogs about either of these?
120: I just now contributed money to Elizabeth Warren's opponent. No, not Scott Brown. The lone remaining guy running in the primary. He called me to ask for a contribution, and I agreed. He's a friendly acquaintance, and I had previously contributed to his (successful) race for state legislature. His politics are pretty good, and I admire him for getting out there and doing the hard work of running for office (he was running as an underdog even before Warren was in the race).
The funny thing is that he made his pitch in the form of "Like you, I'm a Democrat who doesn't hate Wall Street." His exact words were closer to "We need a candidate in the general election who believes in both the public sector and the private sector." I gave him a modest contribution and wished him well. I didn't have the heart to tell him I'm voting for Warren.
This thread provided lots of interesting people to follow, along with a reminder that I'd been meaning for some time to change my Twitter handle, which I've now done. (The previous one was band-specific, and I'm in other bands now, too.)
So, thanks! Maybe I'll start actually using Twitter now. Probably not, but maybe!
The funny thing is that 132 could have totally been written by an actually-existing Kermit Roosevelt.
134: well, there are several.
Re 131
Fwiw, I follow quite a few photography blogs, and have an interest in the visual arts in general. Not that uncommon around here, I'd have thought.
I think that it's come up that people here are basically disinterested in visual art (the name a living painter thread), and generally not interested in hard sciences.
I may have missed whatever threads came to those conclusions, but they doesn't strike me as being quite right or fair.
Alternatively, take that, mcmc and essear!
OT: Holy shit, I just rememebered that 11.11.11 is coming up. The most awesome calendar date of my lifetime, for sure! WHY ISN'T THERE MORE ATTENTION GIVEN TO THIS????
132: I gave him a modest contribution and wished him well. I didn't have the heart to tell him I'm voting for Warren.
AAAGH! But what if he feels sad? What if he goes home tonight and his partner asks how the day went and he says "Well, mostly discouraging, but I talked to my friendly acquaintance Kermit, and he gave me a donation! Maybe I can pull this off yet!"
I can't even stand to think about it and I really hate neo-liberals.
Yeah, 131.3 strikes me as bizarre.
There is sometimes a current of science-philistinism -- "I don't see the value of anything not quantifiable via experimental investigation" (looks at LB) -- but lots of people seem interested in the arts.
I saw a presentation today that attempted to quantify via experimental investigation the improvements in cognitive function caused by the reading of fiction, so that can stay.
144: Hrmphf. I mean, I know the conversations you're talking about, but I don't think that's an accurate portrayal of the things I've said in them.
K-sky, you just messaged me on Twitter to see who I am, but I can't reply - presumably because you don't follow me. Anyway my handle there is air/ne/og - googleproofed as I don't really want my real name to link back here. Sadly my attempts at privacy over the years have left me with an awkward combo of moribund usernames here and there mixed with real name in other places.
I think if you @[handle] him in a tweet, he can see it regardless of whether he follows you.
Here's the thread where living painters came up:
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_11590.html
start at comment 191.
For science, I guess that I mostly mean the lack of responses when this very question (what are good science blogs?) has come up, the way that science topics usually cause threads to die quickly, and that there are few cites to papers when they do come up. Gabardine Bath... had detailed and interesting remarks a few times, so did the pause then enter(9) pseud, Sifu when he talks about work, Megan about water.
The contrast with belles-lettres (is there a better noun? Humanities topics I guess), music, or domestic politics seems really strong to me.
Not trying to be divisive or critical, hoping this doesn't read that way....
re: 147
Heheh. I'm caricaturing, but there is a whiff of that about some things you say.
Mao suits, and all.
149: I was going to ask who air/ne/og was since it was very clearly somebody from here.
Wait, if someone sends you a message, you can't reply unless that person follows you? That can't be right. It makes less than zero sense. I could see not being able to message anyone who doesn't follow you. But that's totally different.
re: 151
I don't think contemporary painters are necessarily a good bellwether. I know a lot of people who are really interested in the arts, specifically visual arts, and who are by no means people with conservative or retrogressive tastes, but who have little or no interest in contemporary painting.
As I recall, a lot of us hated having to make dioramas in school. The conclusion was drawn by some that this was the result of being verbal and not visual people and not poor instruction design or anything else like that.
151: Hrm. I'm interested in science-type topics, but mostly as a spectator. I think what's going on there is that you're not going to have much of a back&forth with meaningful citations to scholarly literature unless you have a critical mass of specialists, which we don't have in any specific scientific discipline.
I would tend to classify myself as being interested in the visual arts, but I guess it's true that I never seek out things to read about them. I spend quite a bit of time in art museums, though I probably can't talk very intelligently about what I see there.
The trouble with science blogs is that most of the ones that I know that don't suck end up being mostly not about science at all. (Internet discourse about mathematics seems to operate at a much higher level, which always seems like an interesting social phenomenon to me but I don't know why it works or how to replicate it.) I suspect that blogging is just not a medium that's very well-suited to talking about science. I wouldn't venture to guess whether the same is true with respect to art.
Is LB being simultaneously ribbed for being uninterested in science (151) and uninterested in anything but science (144)?
the way that science topics usually cause threads to die quickly
I'd wager that this is not so much because folks here are not interested in the hard sciences, but rather that hard science topics don't make very good fodder for Unfogged threads, which tend to flourish to the extent that people can bring up personal opinions and experiences. And cock jokes, of course.
I believe so. This indicates to me that my attention span has deteriorated to the point where I'm not capable of maintaining an interest in anything at all. Soon, I will lapse into a coma.
Also, the commenters of Crooked Timber seem largely to have thought I was a guy. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but somehow it depresses me. I do like to think of myself as sparkling with femininity.
I don't recommend any science blogs because it makes me realize that all of the science blogs I find interesting are ones that write about things extremely far removed from what I work on, and then I get depressed because what I work on is apparently not what I'm interested in.
Oh, except the "ERV" blog. I like that one and that's about viruses. Also a bunch of parts of the "Scientopia" network.
There's not very much cross-pollination on the blogs that I like. Even the best bloggers (e.g. "In the Pipeline") usually have about 350,000 things on the blogroll without ever specifying which ones they particularly like. It's like back in 1996 where if you had a website about sea slugs etiquette demanded that you have a page of LINKS to every other website about sea slugs because search engines didn't work.
This is about twitter. Also, visual.
re: 157
Ditto, I suppose. I have a sort of academic interest in the human and medical sciences, and a decent lay-person's understanding of the hard sciences, but there are people here -- working scientists -- for whom the sort of level of discussion I might have about those sciences would be laughably dumb and ill-informed. I'm also somewhat interested in economics, for example, but wise enough to know I know shit-all about it.
re: 158.2
Yes, I find a lot of science blogs are very interested in science-advocacy, rather than science itself (iyswim). Lots of 'yay, science!', which isn't very interesting. The science blogs I come back to more regularly are in genetics and anthropology, as there's both meaty controversies/paradigm-shifts happening, and a willingness to discuss the science. I expect there's similar physics blogs but I'm not aware of what those might be.
155. Fair enough, but if they write here, they don't talk about older art either or link to visually-rich sites. Ogged did-- he's how I found sartorialist, and a couple of other sites that are now defunct. Front page posts with something visual (other than a self-done snapshot) are thin on the ground.
Be the change you want, I guess. I could try sending in a few, but I think I'm missing something about what's interesting to folks here. Still, I'll try for a couple.
158. What you say about math vs science is true; one thing I've noticed is that science blogs veer towards popular controversies rather than analysis quickly, so have a short life.
I'm not very interested in the visual arts (assuming that doesn't include film/TV/theater).
I've got a strong amateur interest in paleontology/evolutionary biology, and a strange relationship to physics (I work on math that's closely related to physics but don't actually know anything about physics).
Tetrapod Zoology is my favorite science blog. But I read a few more (Cosmic Variance, The Loom), and would be happy to read even more if I found them. (I also read lots of math blogs, but those are different.)
What you say about math vs science is true; one thing I've noticed is that science blogs veer towards popular controversies rather than analysis quickly, so have a short life.
It seems to work like political blogs. If you stop writing about what you're an expert on and start writing about random other things you find interesting, or if you try to write once a day, and you have a following, you start to feel like your following wants to know what your response is to current events, whether you know a lot about them or not. Before you know it, 18 of your top 20 most popular posts boil down to "Creationists are morons" or "Creationists are ruthless liars".
I find that I don't have a lot of the language to talk about visual art that interests me. I really like 16th-early 20th century painting*, and tend to look at pretty much everything when I go to an art museum and tend to go to art museums more than any other type of museum. But I don't have a whole lot to say about it, especially retrospectively.
I've been very happy with the point and shoot camera I got earlier this summer to use for research and have taken a bunch of photographs just for fun. But I'm holding off making that a real "hobby" until I can invest more time in it and get a better camera. I really should join flickr or something like that, though. I post photos on facebook occasionally, but I don't want to make facebook stuff public.
*There's a fair amount of contemporary or at least mid-to-late 20th century stuff that I've liked, but I never write down names and then I forget about it.
155/165: The linked thread doesn't seem to be at all a good measure of the interest of people here even in contemporary art. The question on the table was what living artists are famous among the general public, not just the art world. Whether I'm personally familiar with the work of Lisa Yuskavage is neither here nor there in that regard.
Tetrapod Zoology looks pretty sweet.
Yeah, I mean, contemporary painting doesn't usually knock me on my ass the way a really good album or movie would. Sometimes, but it's pretty rare. And most of the stuff you see in modern art museums isn't even painting -- there's video and sculpture and photography and multimedia and what-have-you. I feel like the only way I could really have anything intelligent to say about living painters is if I really put some time into going to the museums, and scanning the catalogs and blogs and what not. And I have a membership to a modern art museum, albeit one that does not get as much use as it should.
As far as hard science goes, most of the really technical stuff is over my head, and discussions of theory kinda bore me, but I do read a fair amount of decent science journalism. It's rare that I get bent out of shape enough to go rallying blog commenters or whatever though.
Following/ messaging etc:-
I haven't quite figured it out yet. When you @ somebody it depends on their settings I think whether they see it - default is not unless they follow you. Don't know why the private message thing didn't send but am assuming same story.
There are a lot of pretty interesting brain/neuroscience blogs, if that's a thing you're interested in.
Ooh, a virus blog, thanks!
One of my spectator fields is mesoscale physics, where it's important that materials are not continuous but rather made of atoms, but deals with phenomena too large to approach from first principles-- crack propagation, micelles, peeling tape. This kind of stuff, so review articles and book chapters but not blogs.
OK, I am lw208xx on twitter, lurch, I'll try the thing out.
I'm also a bit skeptical of the idea that if people don't write about a topic here, that indicates lack of interest in it. I wrote my dissertation on a subject that has to do in part with visual art, but there just isn't that much call here for me to be going on about, say, Laokoon.
re: 168.2
I wouldn't let that hold you back. Sometimes limited gear is good. Having to/wanting to use all the latest gear with all the bells and whistles can be paralysing.
Actually, I'd be interested, whether the sculpture or the El Greco. Of course all that there is here is what people choose to write and link. I guess that my point was that among a relatively well-rounded bunch of people, there's not much talking about art or science.
168.2 don't worry about the camera, that doesn't matter. (In fact there is -nothing- worse than people who do worry about the camera.) Worry about more interesting things.
Also, sure, I could bore you all silly about the contents of Vitamin P and so-on, but talking about contemporary art just isn't as fun in writing. (Or rather, requires way more of a common ground of skill and knowledge to be as fun.)
I have a math blog that I haven't updated in a while. I've had it for a long time now, but I lost steam right around the point I realized that if I got a comment that said "Great post", it was spam, and that all comments from real people consisted of nitpicking. The key to successful blogging is the ability to write posts off the cuff, but I became obsessed with making my posts nitpick-proof, which means they all took days to write.
I'd like to write a math blog sometime. It would kind of read like a Pygmy Marmoset blogging about Obama's election chances.
Also, sure, I could bore you all silly about the contents of Vitamin P and so-on
IME no one finds the contents of Vitamin P boring.
177,179: That's certainly true and I'm not really "worried" about that camera all that much. Most of the time when I take pictures just for fun I use the automatic settings/scenes. But there's a couple of things I'd like to do - longer exposures, night photography - that the camera just can't handle. It's also surprisingly not as good at macro close-up stuff as the much older camera I'd been using, but I suspect I just haven't worked out the setting on that one.
Really, the main thing holding me back is just me holding myself back. It would probably be a better use of my time than other things I do that could be called procrastination to go somewhere solely for the purpose of taking pictures, but I still haven't gone anywhere just for that out a self-perceived view that "I don't have time for it." But I carry the camera around a lot of the time or bring it if I go hiking. Actually, that's a huge benefit of having a point-and-shoot.
I think my favourite thing to do with a camera is just to use it for 'focused walking'. It sounds insufferably pretentious but I find the possibility of taking photos lets me pay attention to the world in a way I really like. I often go out for hours and take no photos, or take photos that are indistinguishable from dozens I've taken before, but the process is still pleasant.
I often actively prefer cameras that are limited in some way, as it's another part of the process of being more 'present'. All that sounds incredibly arsey, mind.
It sounds insufferably pretentious but I find the possibility of taking photos lets me pay attention to the world in a way I really like. I often go out for hours and take no photos, or take photos that are indistinguishable from dozens I've taken before, but the process is still pleasant.
Nothing insufferably pretentious about an upskirt shot.
185.1 That works for me too. When I'm out and about with a camera I pay much more attention to the world I'm in instead of to what's going on in my head.
And why anyone posting on unfogged should worry about seeming "arsey" is a total mystery.
I don't talk more about science because 1. I don't want to bore the shit out of people and 2. a lot of what I've been learning about would be a little pseudonymity-imperiling to talk too much about.
185.1 is actually pretty close to how I approach just taking photos casually, although I haven't thought about it in quite those terms. I'm still kind of self-conscious about taking the camera out in places that aren't conventionally "photo opportunities" - like taking pictures of buildings in downtown on a weekday - but I've come to prefer having the option to not.
It's been a surprise, given I used to be indifferent to or even actually against taking photos for myself when I was younger.
Also I don't actually know shit about it yet, but that doesn't stop me on any other topic.
IME no one finds the contents of Vitamin P boring.
There's a brilliant Phaidon book that takes the Vitamin Whatever model of a survey-of-bright-young-things that little bit further. It's called Younger Than Jesus. I haven't bothered to actually look at it, because nothing could be better than that title.
185 - it drives me a bit mad when I am out for a walk, ostensibly with C, and he spends the whole time looking at things and/or taking pictures. I generally have the dog or the children to entertain me as well, but I am still resentful.
I was at the National Gallery yesterday with my 9 year old. She thought that too many of the pictures featured naked people. And we noticed that as the pictures got more recent, the people were more clothed.
Is that the sort of thing you're after?
Actually, I'd be interested, whether the sculpture or the El Greco.
I actually meant the book by Lessing! Which refers to the sculpture. I guess that's another reason it doesn't come up here: points of reference don't overlap that much.
I mean, I could tell you all about the weird and not altogether successful production of A Doll's House I saw last night, along with my thoughts about realist theater in today's world or nudity in theater or actors' training in Germany vs. the US or the value of playing a bunch of pieces in repertory. But this just doesn't seem like the place. Unless several people started talking about theater, but not that many people go to a lot of theater.
but not that many people go to a lot of theater.
I realized the other day that I haven't been to a play in at least 7 years. But I'm interested in literally every subject in 193.1 and 193.2, so talk away. I can even come up with strong opinions, if you'd like.
Oh man that was a weird production. On the other hand, now I've seen midget little person butt.
Halford there's some cool theater in LA. Have you been to the opera, at least?
I do go to the opera a reasonable amount (like, twice a year?). I have to say that sitting through a bad play feels like a much bigger risk (more intolerable, and harder to leave) than most other forms of entertainment. Plus my theater contact people are all in NY and all say that theater in LA sucks, and for whatever reason I've internalized that view even if I reject it in all other areas. And it seems hard to figure out unless you're going to marquee touring productions that seem unpromising.
so talk away
I would, if I weren't typing on an iPhone and about to board a plane! But remind me another time.
Yeah, I probably go to galleries or exhibitions at least a couple of times a month. Usually photography, or relatively modern stuff, e.g. the Blast exhibition at Tate Britain, or the Hungarian photographers at the RA, to take two recent ones. But theatre, yeah, much less often. I've only been once this year.
I'm very interested in visual art of many kinds, but I'm mostly interested in looking at it and not very interested in talking about it.
I guess I like talking about some arty things, every once in a while. But what I would have to say about most visual type stuff is "hey look at this" and then some people would look at it, and that would be the end of the conversation.
Actually I feel like this has happened a reasonable number of times when Heebie posts things about design or posters or whatever.
re: 192
Yeah. I don't take photos as much when I'm with my wife as she gets annoyed. But she works one day at week when I'm at home, so that's usually the day I'll go for a wander and take photos, maybe take in a gallery [my wife loves art and is much more knowledgeable about than I am, but doesn't have much interest in photography exhibitions].
Theater in LA probably sucks compared to NY or Chicago, but who cares? Still cool things happening. Why is it harder to leave a play at intermission than the opera?
I'm mostly interested in looking at it and not very interested in talking about it.
Yeah, this. Although I wouldn't mind reading if other people wanted to tell me interesting things. I'm pretty interested in reading about art history, but I tend to be allergic to anything that resembles the text one sometimes finds accompanying contemporary art. When I see something like "this work's narratives of unconscious absurdity challenge the viewer's perception of experiential reality" (somewhat rearranged from something the internet turns up about work by someone I knew in college) my reaction instantly flips from "huh, this is interesting to look at" to "what a pretentious twit." I would enjoy finding something about contemporary art that I could read without wanting to scream.
Never say pretentious: it is crossing a picket line in the arts.
(Not that I really agree with that. But still. I think pretentious is the least useful, least interesting way to talk about art.)
|| http://www.truth-out.org/death-guantanamo-suicide-or-dryboarding/1320182714#.TrMFYZp4KEE.email |>
204: And, in fact, this acquaintance of mine from college was not at all a pretentious person. So: what's up with these words? They're almost content-free and they provoke, at least in me, a visceral negative reaction. If I can look at the art without seeing the words, I'm much happier about it.
They are not in fact content free. I know what those words mean, and what that sentence means, and I would certainly be able to apply that sentence to certain art works (say, Giacometti) and not to others (say, Frank Stella). And I don't think you could rephrase them without losing meaning. So I don't think content free is true. And the fact that they produce a visceral negative reaction is, to me, kind of bizarre. After all, they are merely words, making a statement about art. What is so wrong with them?
Never say pretentious: it is crossing a picket line in the arts.
M-Wei used to identify himself in these parts as "proudly pretentious".
202: Theater in LA probably sucks compared to NY or Chicago
Eh, I haven't seen much theater in any of those towns, but from what I hear, there's just as much really interesting stuff happening in LA per capita as anywhere else. Which is to say, not a whole hell of a lot. If you're comparing middlebrow to middlebrow, then yeah, the general level of talent in NYC is probably superior, but if you're not a theater maven, would you really be able to tell? And of course New York has Broadway and off-Broadway, so there's always plenty of middlebrow theater to go around.
If you want to see people really pushing the envelope you have to go to weird out-of-the-way places. Like Baltimore. That shit don't pay the bills on a Billyburg loft.
Re 210.last, of course, no true actor could afford to live in shabby gentility in Williamsburg. The most prominent NY theater person I've ever met lived in a tiny rent-controlled place in Chelsea that he shared with one other guy. Not that he was that prominent, objectively, but still.
And the fact that they produce a visceral negative reaction is, to me, kind of bizarre. After all, they are merely words, making a statement about art. What is so wrong with them?
They're a lot of abstractions that just don't seem to me to mean very much when put together. What does it mean for a static piece of art to have "narratives"? In what sense is absurdity "unconscious," if we're aware of it and talking about it? I don't want to attack this phrasing too seriously since, as I said, I rearranged something I found (for the sake of google-proofing) and might have mangled it. But I just usually find that this writing is extremely unclear and wish they had said what they were up to in more ordinary language. It may be jargon but it isn't jargon that appears to me to contain a lot of precise information when unpacked.
The notion of narrative in a static* art work is a pretty interesting concept. But it's a pretty well established thing to say that a sculpture or a painting has a narrative. (Or narratives.) It makes sense to others.
How can something be unconscious if we are talking about is a bit of a red herring: see Krauss' work on the optical unconscious for a coherent use of the term.
I don't think it is that the writing is meaningless. I dunno; I get angry at this stuff because it seems to me to be part of a general anti-intellectualism focussed on attacking things that are not easily understandable.
* Of course art works aren't static really when you get down to it the viewer isn't static!
I share essear's reaction. My reaction is "why can't they say it in English?" and I get irritated and disengage.
LA has a very good theater scene. It also has a constant churn of fly-by-night productions meant to give struggling actors a place to corral agents and casting directors. The trick is to tell the difference.
I find that Steven Leigh Morris gives very good recommendations in the LA Weekly Stage Raw column. There are established theater troupes with solid reputations -- I'm very fond of Evidence Room and Circle X. Also, there's quite a lot of it, so if you are willing to take a risk on the production company you can almost always find something by a playwright you enjoy.
I think pretentious is the least useful, least interesting way to talk about art
This, absolutely. 9 times out of 10 "pretentious" = "I don't understand you and it's making me insecure."
But you would get annoyed if someone turned up to your classes, and when you started to use technical terms, said `this is not English' and left. (And you would get annoyed if you were asked to give a public talk and people left at the first use of mathematical terms.)
216 gets it exactly wrong. If I were trying to talk to the public and people left because it was too technical, that would be my fault, not theirs -- a public talk should strive to be comprehensible to the public. If I have to know what "Krauss' work on the optical unconscious" is to understand the text next to a piece of art in a museum, something is wrong.
I like it when people say what they mean in plain language and make it no more obscure than it has to be. But who knows? Maybe I'm just an anti-intellectual.
I dislike it when mathematicians don't write and lecture clearly, too.
It's funny to see this post, when a couple of times recently I've had the odd hankering to create a Twitter account purely for the sake of being able to connect a couple of people I think should know about each other's work. (I'm ignoring this urge and hoping it will pass.)
I think I know what Megan was getting at with regard to the smaller-than-expected pool of "new" writers. I've come to the conclusion that it's not that they're not out there, it's that the online world so perfectly recapitulates the social circles and expectations of the offline world.
So people end up being invisible to each other in really remarkable ways. It's the online equivalent of being in a meeting and having a lower-status person say something and everyone ignores it, and then having a higher-status person repeat the same idea 15 minutes later and everyone embraces it. Except times a zillion, because it's the Internet and people are still operating from this paradigm that the playing field is flat and there are no barriers to entry.
And at least in the areas where I'm competent to judge what's going on, people who write in plain language as much as possible almost always understand what they're talking about much better than people who write primarily in technical jargon. There are whole fields that survive only because their practitioners make such a fog of technical verbiage that neither outsiders nor, sometimes, they themselves can keep track of the fact that the whole thing is resting on shaky assumptions.
220: Economists have had a rough few years, so maybe they'll learn.
We're talking about economists, right?
Damnit. I started with a different joke, and then decided just to make fun of economists, and those lost seconds ended up losing the war.
With that in mind, I think the primary thing that bugs me about these descriptions of art is that they so rarely make any contact with the concrete thing I'm looking at. It's usually not "the purple swirl at the top left is associated with X, and the diagonal slashes suggest movement which gives rise to associations of Y," it's just "this work confronts X with Y through its exploration of form and color," or whatever. If you want your meaning to be clear, concreteness is your friend.
I had in mind loop quantum gravity, but sure, economics too.
I was slightly worried that in the time it took me to type 223, Moby was going to make the same point but quicker and better.
227 to 226. I can't feel my lips even.
And I can't feel Moby's lips either.
228: Did you leave them at the bar?
It's a nice bar, so I think they'll have my lips in the morning if I can't find them at home.
Maybe your lips went home with someone.
Maybe Mulva Clefty took Loose Lips.
I feel like the commentary that accompanies visual art is an order of magnitude more pretentious than film criticism, music criticism, POETRY criticism even. I'm with Keir in reflexively hating the word "pretentious". Usually it means either "This director is trying to do something creative without pretending to not be creative! How self-indulgent!" or "This director failed, because there's something I didn't understand". But I look at the text accompanying paintings by young artists, and man... it just looks like they could all be randomly swapped with each other and nobody would notice. This artist interrogates __________. This artist explores _______. This artist subverts ____________. This artist is fierce. This artist is mordant. This thing is floating, this thing is kinetic, this thing is massive, this thing is actually two things juxtaposed in the act of becoming.
I've talked about my family's 'just a hint of rotting eucalyptus' thing before. (From a wine tasting.) Sometimes the pretentious shoe fits.
I was in Napa and people kept trying to get me to smell things in wine. They had a bunch of vials of smelly stuff for me to compare with. It was like that Kevin Kline movie where Meg Ryan tried to marry a Canadian but failed because hot French women apparently want to fuck Canadians. Anyway, I don't smell much in wine but I don't really worry about it.
The thing you need to know for wine descriptions is that if you want to describe it via a fruit then you have to make sure that the color of the fruit matches the color of the wine. A dark wine could be plum or dark cherry, but never strawberry.
But the big things in wine (fruity, oaky, mineral, leathery, etc.) aren't so hard to recognize. And good New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc's really do taste like pineapple, and good hefeweizen really do smell like bananas.
239 reminds me of a story of someone saying that a wine smelled like wet dog, and the tasting room attendant replying "I think the words you're looking for are 'damp forest floor.'"
really do smell like bananas
Mmm, isoamyl acetate.
Now I'm happier than ever about my recent shift to cheap Scotch.
236 But I look at the text accompanying paintings by young artists, and man... it just looks like they could all be randomly swapped with each other and nobody would notice.
Yeah, this is what I mean about wanting to see more concreteness. The text rarely seems to be grounded in actual features of the thing I'm looking at.
I should really try to verify 239. IIRC, a group of Houston doctors were tasting French wines from the time of Napoleon.
good hefeweizen
Such a thing exists? The brewmaster at the brewery I worked at called it dirty beer.
good hefeweizen really do smell like bananas.
This is exactly why there is no such thing as good hefeweizen in my book. Ugh.
There's plenty of bad pompous art writing out there. There's good art writing too that seems "unclear" to middlebrow jackholes. And sometimes (often, even) the dude with the bad writing has an interesting point or information that you haven't thought about before, just by virtue of being around the scene. Unless you're an art writer or particuarly insecure about your taste, none of this should make much of a difference to your enjoyment of the art. Though it can make it hard to find things worth seeing.
It's the online equivalent of being in a meeting and having a lower-status person say something and everyone ignores it, and then having a higher-status person repeat the same idea 15 minutes later and everyone embraces it. Except times a zillion, because it's the Internet and people are still operating from this paradigm that the playing field is flat and there are no barriers to entry.
Yeah, reading Megan's comment made me think of the people, who knows how many, out there who write some really interesting stuff but have, like 10 readers. They can be hard to find if people you read don't link to them often or don't know about them at all and even if you do read them once the barriers to adding a new person to your reading list can be high, so that post has to be really good to get you to see what else they've written.
This doesn't mean there's a whole lot more people actively writing who just haven't been "found" but it does mean that their reach can be quite narrow, in internet terms. It's a bit different than the meeting analogy, though, in that at a meeting everyone hears the person who's ignored. But the exact analogy can happen too when more influential people fail to credit others for ideas.
I can't think of a music critic I regularly agree with. And the one musician I know who became a music critic got slashed and burned by the music community. No one would talk to him, and he was done in that business. (Went on to get a Ph.D. in something about caveman bones, actually.)
Any music critics I should be reading? Or following on Twitbook?
255: Following. Golly, this Twitter thing is downright easy.
Wet dogs smell very different than damp forest floors. I think that tasting room attendant should look for a new job. Philistine.
A number of the Onion A/V Club writers are good, although the news ones seem a bit young. I had a really good run with The War Against Silence, but he's mostly shut down and on the rare occasion that he puts something out, it's obscure beyond my limits.
In other news, I shall wear my trousers rolled.
With that in mind, I think the primary thing that bugs me about these descriptions of art is that they so rarely make any contact with the concrete thing I'm looking at. It's usually not "the purple swirl at the top left is associated with X, and the diagonal slashes suggest movement which gives rise to associations of Y," it's just "this work confronts X with Y through its exploration of form and color," or whatever. If you want your meaning to be clear, concreteness is your friend.
The problem is that this is a kind of formalist criticism that people just don't think works any more. It is Fry and Greenberg and maybe Rosenberg. (And is open to attack on being basically a tool of the modernist oppressor.)
I don't know think you should have to know about Krauss to understand the wall text at a gallery. That was more in the way of an example of the use of unconscious in modern art writing.
It is Fry and Greenberg and maybe Rosenberg.
It's comments like this that make essear's point precisely, I think.
It's modernist and oppressive to try to actually refer to what the art looks like?
Yeah, if your goal is to convince me that this sort of text is not full of shit, you are not doing it.
I just assume I'm not the target audience for wall text like that. Probably not the target audience for the art, either, but I'm fine liking or disliking it for the wrong reasons.
I mean, yes, to elaborate on what Stanley says, Keir, your comments do not read as if you want to communicate with us, because I don't think you can reasonably expect us to know what they mean. They read as if you want to invoke codewords that only the well-informed will appreciate, and leave the rest of us in the dark. I don't have a problem with insider jargon except when it's explicitly directed at people who are not insiders. So it's the same problem as the wall text.
Uh, Essear, I'm moderately sympathetic to your point (that is, I think a lot of the write ups next to contemporary art I've seen are silly marketing) but there's really nothing lamer than "here's a topic I can be bothered to make an effort learn anything about, but why do I find it all so uncles and confusing?".
Unclear. I'm sure your uncles are fine.
It's modernist and oppressive to try to actually refer to what the art looks like?
Well, ok. No, it isn't exactly modernist and oppressive to refer to what the art looks like, although in some cases it is pretty misguided. (Say,
But. There is a certain kind of art criticism, exemplified by Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg, that focuses primarily on formal qualities of art works. For instance, Fry says that the most important thing in a work of art is the ``significant form''. We are to ignore the illustrational content of the work in favour of the ``emotional elements inherent in natural form''. But no one seriously believes in that kind of criticism any more, for various reasons. (Feminism, post-modernism, modernism, Duchamp, post-colonialism, the fact that formal analysis can be made to say what you want it to say etc.)
Which is another reason I dislike many attacks on art writing as pretentious and not plain English. A great deal of it emanates from the New Criterion school of idiocy, and is basically useless and immoral.
That's not to say that specific reference to the object of criticism isn't important. But to ask people to engage in formal analysis of art work these days is pretty pointless.
And I do not think that Fry and Greenberg are codewords known only to selected elites. I think that they are pretty much the most famous art critics since Diderot.
This is the first result I get when I search google for [Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg]. The second hit goes to wikipedia for art criticism.
264: Well, I guess it's a question of who the audience is. I'm capable of going to art exhibits and finding them interesting or appealing without knowing anything about contemporary art criticism, just as I'm capable of reading novels and appreciating them without reading literary criticism. It sounds like Keir (and maybe you) are saying I should view wall text as a form of criticism and ignore it if I'm not interested in learning how this jargon works. But I thought the goal was to present information that might be interesting to the average viewer, putting the work in context-- in which case the bad examples (and I don't claim they're all bad!) misjudge their audience.
I've been browsing examples of wall text on Flickr, and pretty much everything that's coming up is informative and clear. The bad examples I was running into recently were things I was seeing on Facebook associated with student artists; maybe that's colored my judgment.
the most famous art critics since Diderot
Ruskin?
That's not a very helpful wikipedia article. I blame the geeks and nerds. Anyway, I've actually heard of Avant-Garde and Kitsch but I haven't read it.
Here's someone who has real examples of the kind of thing that annoys me (PDF link).
The "between" vs. "among" nitpick is not inclining me towards the view of the person linked in 271. The sentence might have problems, but "site of convergence among..." isn't going to help things.
I do agree that wall text ought be clear and informative. Personally, I dislike wall text (cause I am lucky enough to hardly ever need it, and generally am pretty happy with just a credit line) but if there is to be wall text, it really ought be clear and informative for anyone, and in my view generally ought confine itself to factual statements where possible.
It is more things like catalogue essays or artists statements that I am willing to defend pretentiousness in.
(Um, I think both Fry and Greenberg are more famous than Ruskin; certainly their methods are!)
Wikipedia is awful on the fine arts.
That label asserts what should go without
saying: that an artist makes his work carefully
(as opposed to carelessly). "Based in" is a
recent rhetorical device, borrowed from press
releases, that gives any artist an aura of globe-
trotting renown. And "as he moves through the
city" lends the mysteriousness of a Paul Auster
novel to what is most likely simple scavenging.
Really? There are many carelessly made works of art in museums these days.
Whitney Biennials are known to be art-wank though and it is not like you don't know what you are letting yourself in for when you go the Whitney.
Man, internet neighborhoods are circular. I just followed a link from a Chris Bertram tweet to something identified only as a good post, and it turned out to be LGM mostly quoting a CT comment of mine.
258: I was also a big fan of TWAS for a long time but only really overlapped in terms of taste about a decade ago. Yikes.
re: 275
Yeah, I saw a tweet earlier from a Guardian columnist whose website I read, making a reference to Kotsko. Small world.
I don't read a lot of music critics writing about current music, so grain of salt. But Matt Diehl's been pretty good. He's the little brother of a friend from years ago.
To 271,
Huyghe's film creates a site of convergence between memory, interpretation, representation, and transformation.
does indeed seem meaningless and stupid. OTOH the other examples cited are, first:
Based in San Francisco, Lucas DeGiulio carefully pieces together his works from a vast repository of materials gathered as he moves through the city.
which is, you know, totally ordinary and comprehensible and actually describes the guy's process and where he's from. Second [for a bunch of awnings put together by a collective]
Physically sited at the entrance of the exhibition, [these faux awnings] blur the boundary between the gallery and the street. By occupying an institution normally dedicated to the exhibition of the products of individual authorship, the awnings also question the mythic status of artistic originality and challenge art's permanence."
which is (a) totally comprehensible, and (b) descriptive and somewhat illuminating about the origins and intended purpose of the work. I mean, it's not the deepest art criticism in the world but it's not "ZOMG incomprehensible" either.
239: It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
