Found this little gem photocopied and folded while moving things around to fit a gem of a dumpster dive. Wish I could remember where it came from… This is some pre-Batali and Gweneth go to Spain Julia Turshen humor.

The New York Times reveals that the National Geographic Society is entertaining the idea of opening up its archive of more than 11 million images to the fine-art market for the first time.

If you want to engineer buildings or paint or sculpt, fine. But doing all three is just tacky. It says, “I think I’m better than you because I made the statue of David and designed St. Peter’s Basilica and you spent 45 minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to play ‘Smooth Criminal’ on the guitar.” Well, I’m unimpressed by a broad ouvre. As the saying goes, “It doesn’t matter many extracurricular activities you have on your application to Jerk University. It’s still Jerk University, and it’s still a shitty school.”

There’s lots more inside, where we visit the Nicholas Roerich Museum and get in touch with our deep-seeded hatred of polymaths.

I’ve never quite understood the concept of reassembling historic rooms, putting a red velvet rope around it, and funneling tourists on a counter-intuitive path through a house, castle, or museum. But once Yinka Shonibare placed child figures ducking under desks…

God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt, right?
“Their first big exhibit is a perfect example of the principle in action. It’s a model of a dinosaur dig, with two men working away at excavating the bones. There is a video accompanying it in which the two views are presented. The younger Asian fellow in front says, and I paraphrase, “This animal died about a hundred million years ago. Its body dried in the sun for several days before being slowly buried under layers of sediment in a local flood.” Then the avuncular creationist says, “I see the same bones, but I believe this dinosaur was killed suddenly about 4400 years ago in a huge global flood, which buried it deeply all at once.” And then he goes on to explain that see, they have the very same evidence, but he understands it in the light of God’s word.”

What will you Amass?

Anatomie Hommes vers 1900

So a few months ago went all nerdcore and ordered $3 paperbacks of all of William Gibson’s old books. You know, guy who coined the word cyberspace, was writing about “the matrix” in the 80s, imagined we “jack in” to the internets through literal sockets in our skulls.

Anyway, we’re reading Count Zero at the moment, and a nodal point in the plot references Joseph Cornell boxes. Being embarrassingly unversed in art history, we looked ‘em up–little boxes of composed ephemera and second hand objects–french maps, cut outs of birds, newsprint–it’s like this guy is channelling an inner aesthetic we could never quite put our finger on. Here’s a little write up on a nice meta-collectors blog that we came across in our digging. We are amazed and inspired.

this memorial day, remember that we’ll be blogging again soon, we promise!

Lauren’s post on the awesome World Digital Library reminded us of another impressive online art collection, Google Earth’s Masterpieces of the Prado. These images weigh in at 14,000 megapixels, meaning you get closer to works by Dürer, Bosch, and Reubens in Google Earth than you would be able to in person. It’s pretty remarkable—you can see brushtrokes and cracks in the oil paint, but never any pixelation. Definitely best viewed in full screen Google Earth mode, but you can also check out some of these massive images in Google Maps.