Painting is dead. Painting isn’t dead. Painting is dead! No, it isn’t! Yes, it is! Isn’t! Is! Shut up shut up shut up shut up!!! Okay, now that we have that out of the way… Painting isn’t the denial-plagued zombie elephant in the room — art theory is. It’s one of the lines Leonard Cohen left out: Everybody knows a work of art that doesn’t speak for itself is a failure as a work of art. Fortunately, in spite of the best efforts we critics have mustered to impose Artforum’s Rules of Order on the rabble, art — and particularly the medium non grata of painting — just won’t shut up.
Painters in the contemporary art world, particularly those from L.A., have to maintain a chameleonesque indeterminacy about their artistic intentions — be all things to all people — or face ghettoization. Is this an abstract painting? Or a painting of a painting of an abstract painting, wink wink? It’s the emperor’s new clothes all over. The ultimate irony is that the emperor is actually decked out in an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — the plausible deniability cultivated by painters for the social sphere creates a temporary autonomous zone in the studio wherein a thousand flowers have blossomed. No one can pin them down, so they can get away with anything. The psycho art-market bubble hasn’t hurt production either.
more from the LA Weekly here.
From Nature:
Chimpanzees in Uganda have been spotted eating dirt along with fistfuls of leaves. This might help to increase the plants’ anti-malarial properties, say researchers. Many animals, including humans, are known to deliberately eat soil, a practice called geophagy. Though the animals and people might not be aware of it, the main reason for this is that munching on dirt can have health benefits. Soil contains scarce minerals, such as iron, and can counter diarrhea, absorb toxins, and facilitate digestion. Eating earth can also reduce hunger pangs during famine.
Now, it seems that soil might also boost the pharmaceutical properties of foods.
Sabrina Krief, a veterinarian at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, noticed that chimpanzees in Kibale National Park often ate soil shortly before or after eating the leaves of Trichilia rubescens . After finding that the leaves contained novel anti-malarial compounds, the researchers suggested that the apes were self-medicating.
More here.
From Scientific American:
Acacia trees are the iconic shrub of the East African savanna. Their thorny thickets house a host of creatures and provide sustenance to the local charismatic megafauna, from elephants to zebras. In light of this continual foraging, the plants have struck a mutually beneficial bargain with several species of ants. The insect armies swarm intrusive browsers in exchange for housing and food. But according to new research in Science, it appears that without such browsing—a state of affairs the acacia might be thought to long for—the trees suffer.
Zoologist Todd Palmer and his colleagues examined the interdependence of one such acacia species—the whistling thorn tree, Acacia drepanolobium—the ants it hosts and the herbivores that eat it. He compared six such trees in Kenya that have been surrounded by an electrified fence since 1995 (by entomologist Truman Young of the University of California, Davis) with six trees open to local giraffes, elephants and other acacia-eaters. In the absence of herbivores, the whistling acacia stopped producing little ant houses in hollow thorns—known as domatia—and excreting the sweet nectar that its bodyguard ants eat. But instead of spurring more growth, the acacias found themselves more than twice as likely to be providing a home to another type of ant—Crematogaster sjostedti—which do not defend the trees and rely on invasions of the bark-boring cerambycid beetle larvae to build the holes in which they dwell. “The cavity-nesting antagonistic ants actually promote the activities of the stem-boring beetle,” says biologist Robert Pringle of Stanford University.
More here.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Flann O’Brien’s fictional scientist and savant De Selby conceived a theory that darkness, far from being the absence of light, is really an accumulation of minutely small black corpuscles. I had attributed this wonderful notion to O’Brien’s joyful surrealism, but I learn from Pascal Richet, in A Natural History of Time, that in 1896 the physicist Gustave Le Bon actually announced to the Academy of Science in Paris the discovery of black light. Maybe the voraciously curious O’Brien had come across this absurdity – a forgotten footnote in scientific history. There was no shortage of similar oddities at the end of the nineteenth century, following the discovery of X-rays – those mysterious entities that could pass through flesh itself. N-rays, “a new type of radiation”, for example, were visible particularly to their discoverer, an otherwise respectable professor from Nancy called René Blondlot. Like radium, they emitted radiant matter. He said of them: “The observer should accustom himself to look at the screen just as a painter, and in particular an ‘impressionist’ painter, would look at a landscape. To attain this requires some practice . . . some people, in fact, never succeed”. Indeed they didn’t, for N-rays were a fiction.
more from the TLS here.
TARA DONOVAN’S PINS are hard to miss. There are thousands of them upstairs at the new Institute of Contemporary Art. They’re smushed together almost as if dropped into a trash compactor, except instead of being bent, they form a 3½-foot-tall block of sinewy, shiny metal. This is art, and it sits in the center of a gallery at the ICA, one of the signature pieces of the museum’s collection.
Stare at “Untitled (Pins),” and you’re likely to have questions. How does this cube stick together? Is it solid or a kind of pin shell? And what of the artist? Did Donovan get pricked as she manipulated the piece? Was she wearing protective gloves? What kind of care and persistence did it require for her to turn these thousands of glittering pins into such a perfect square?
One thing you might not expect: Donovan didn’t put “Untitled (Pins)” together at all. The New York City artist figured out how to shape a mass of pins and sent instructions to the museum; the work was assembled in July, and again in August, entirely by the hands of ICA employees.
more from Boston Globe Ideas here.
In the NYT:
Tata Motors today took the covers off the world’s cheapest car — the Nano.
Over the past year, Tata has been building hype for a car that would cost a mere 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500) and bring automotive transportation to the mainstream Indian population. It has been nicknamed the “People’s Car.” Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.
With the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey” playing, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors drove the small white bubble car onto Tata’s show stage, where it joined two others.
They are not concept cars, they are not prototypes,” Mr. Tata announced when he got out of the car. “They are the production cars that will roll out of the Singur plant later this year.”
The four-door Nano is a little over 10 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide. It is powered by a 623cc two-cylinder engine at the back of the car. With 33 horsepower, the Nano is capable of 65 miles an hour. Its four small wheels are at the absolute corners of the car to improve handling. There is a small trunk, big enough for a duffel bag.
In American Scientist, Gilbert Harman reviews Margaret A. Boden’s Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science:
In her latest book, the lively and interesting Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, the relevant machine is usually a computer, and the cognitive science is usually concerned with the sort of cognition that can be exhibited by a computer. Boden does not discuss other aspects of the subject, broadly conceived, such as the “principles and parameters” approach in contemporary linguistics or the psychology of heuristics and biases. Furthermore, she also puts to one side such mainstream developments in computer science as data mining and statistical learning theory. In the preface she characterizes the book as an essay expressing her view of cognitive science as a whole, a “thumbnail sketch” meant to be “read entire” rather than “dipped into.”
It is fortunate that Mind as Machine is highly readable, particularly because it contains 1,452 pages of text, divided into two very large volumes. Because the references and indices (which fill an additional 179 pages) are at the end of the second volume, readers will need to have it on hand as they make their way through the first. Given that together these tomes weigh more than 7 pounds, this is not light reading!
Boden’s goal, she says, is to show how cognitive scientists have tried to find computational or informational answers to frequently asked questions about the mind—”what it is, what it does, how it works, how it evolved, and how it’s even possible.” How do our brains generate consciousness? Are animals or newborn babies conscious? Can machines be conscious? If not, why not? How is free will possible, or creativity? How are the brain and mind different? What counts as a language?
Also in The Wilson Quarterly, Benjamin Barber:
Why, as a nation, are we so obsessed with competition, so indifferent to cooperation? For starters, competition really is as American as apple pie. America has always been deeply individualistic, and individualism has presumed the insularity and autonomy of persons and, thus, a natural rivalry among them. Capitalism also embraces competition as its animus, and America is nothing if not capitalistic. Even the American understanding of democracy, which emphasizes representation and the collision of interests, puts the focus on division and partisanship. There are, of course, democratic alternatives. Systems of proportional representation, for example, aim to ensure fair representation of all parties and views no matter how numerous. But our system, with its single-member districts and “first past the post” elections, is winner take all and damn the hindmost, a setup in which winners govern while losers look balefully on, preparing themselves for the next battle.
This has never been more so than in this era when politics has, in Jonathan Chait’s recent portrait in The New Republic, become “an atavistic clash of partisan willpower,” with Christian Right pitted against the Netroots Left in a polarized media environment defined by hyperbolic talk radio and the foolish excesses of the blogosphere. Moderation, cooperation, compromise, and bipartisanship are lame reflections of a pusillanimous past and of a “pathetic and exhausted leadership” incapable of winning elections.
Via Delong, Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen in The Wilson Quarterly:
On the charitable side, part of microcredit’s appeal lies in the fact that the lending institutions can fund themselves once they are launched. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, explains that you can begin by investing $60 billion in the world’s poorest people, “and then you’re done!”
But can microcredit achieve the massive changes its proponents claim? Is it the solution to poverty in the developing world, or something more modest—a way to empower the poor, particularly poor women, with some control over their lives and their assets?
On trips to Africa and India we have talked to lenders, borrowers, and other poor people to try to understand the role microcredit plays in their lives. We met people like Stadile Menthe in Botswana. Menthe is, in many ways, the classic borrower. A single mother with little formal education, she borrowed money to expand the small grocery store she runs on a dusty road on the outskirts of Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone. Menthe’s store has done well, and she has expanded into the lucrative business of selling phone cards. In fact, she’s been successful enough that she has built two rental homes next to her store. She has diversified her income and made a better life for herself and her daughter. But how many borrowers are like Menthe? In our judgment, she is the exception, not the norm. Yes, microcredit is mostly a good thing. Very often it helps keep borrowers from even greater catastrophes, but only rarely does it enable them to climb out of poverty.
Glenn Loury and Joshua Cohen discuss over at bloggingheads.tv:
From NoUtopia:
The Clod and the Pebble
William Blake
“Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds Heaven in Hell’s despair.”
So sang a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
From Science:
The single-celled creatures known as protozoans are primitive, exotic, and sometimes just plain weird, resembling animals, plants, or a combination of both. Researchers now report that one animal-like, parasitic protozoan relies on a biochemical pathway that is strikingly plantlike. The discovery could open up a new method of attacking protozoans that cause diseases such as malaria. Parasitic protozoans are extremely difficult to control because their animal-like biologies are often very similar to those of their hosts. As a result, drugs that target these parasites all too often damage the cells of the patient. Hoping to make headway, a team led by microbiologists Kisaburo Nagamune and L. David Sibley of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, took a close look at the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis.
First, the scientists tried comparing biochemical pathways that they identified in the parasite with those of animals to better understand their function. “When we found few similarities, we thought these animal-like protozoans might not be all that they seemed,” says Sibley. So the team compared the biochemical pathways of Toxoplasma with those of plants. It found that the two had a lot in common. Of particular interest was abscisic acid, a hormone that in plants controls stress responses and dormancy. When the researchers disrupted abscisic acid production using a commonly available herbicide, the parasites inside animal cells in culture remained inactive even after reaching numbers that would normally have led to a violent mass exodus. The reason, the team argues, is that abscisic acid is controlling the shift from dormancy to active growth in protozoans, much as it does in plants. The same herbicide saves mice infected with Toxoplasma, the researchers report tomorrow in Nature.
More here.
From Nature:
India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh has announced unprecedented funding for science education and research, saying it is a top priority for his government. He has announced a range of schemes to attract students and replenish government agencies’ shrinking pool of scientific personnel. “We are planning to fund 30 new Central Universities, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology,” Singh said. In the next five years, he added, India will also be launching 1,600 polytechnics, 10,000 vocational schools and 50,000 skill-development centres. One million schoolchildren will receive science innovation scholarships of 5,000 rupees (US$130) each over the next five years, and 10,000 scholarships of 100,000 rupees per year will go to those enrolling on science degree courses.
“We need a quantum jump in science education and research,” Singh said. “This agenda can no longer wait. The time has come for action, and I assure you of my highest personal commitment.” Singh said a plan for implementing the proposals will be devised in the next six months. Funding the schemes has required a fivefold increase in the education budget for 2007–12.
More here.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
If you decide to follow Robin’s prescription for sanity (see 2nd post below), here’s some stuff to listen to. Compiled by George Petros:
Over the course of 13 years I collected the tracks comprising this compilation. Most came from LPs and 8-Tracks that I found in thrift stores and at garage sales all across America. Some came from the LP collections of Joseph Lanza, author of Elevator Music; Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore; Athan Maroulis, proprietor of Stardust Records; and the illustrator Jim Blanchard. Some came from various Lounge-style CDs issued in the mid-90s.
I edited tracks in Peak on a G4. There was no “cleaning up” of the sound; I eliminated only the most blatant scratches and pops. Although many tracks came from beat-up vinyl, or from fragile 8-Tracks, or from umpteenth-generation cassettes, or from out-of-print budget CDs, the sound quality is generally good. Unfortunately, many songs didn’t make it in due to their damaged fidelity.
I was searching for druggy and/or exotic Pop songs reinterpreted by contemporaneous Easy Listening artists, from 1966 through 1971. A few compositions herein pre-date that era, but the performers presented them in the pseudo-psychedelic style of the day.
Go here to listen.
Via Lindsay at Majikthise, Chalmers Johnson pans Charlie Wilson’s War:
One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to “primitives” and “savages” (largely so identified because of their resistance to being “liberated” by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the “underdeveloped world.”
Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of “white” Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin’s discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check out Sven Lindquist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes.”)
When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed, or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a “comedy”), or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious. Thus, for example, Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles film-maker with inside information from the Charlie Wilson production team, notes that the film’s happy ending came about because Tom Hanks, a co-producer as well as the leading actor, “just can’t deal with this 9/11 thing.”
David Jay Brown in Scientific American:
Current studies are focusing on psychedelic treatments for cluster headaches, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), severe anxiety in terminal cancer patients, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism and opiate addiction. New drugs must pass three clinical milestones before they can be marketed to the public, called phase I (for safety, usually in 20 to 80 volunteers), phase II (for efficacy, in several hundred subjects) and phase III (more extensive data on safety and efficacy come from testing the drug in up to several thousand people). All the studies discussed in this article have received government approval, and their investigators are either in the process of recruiting human subjects or have begun or completed research on human subjects in the first or second stage of this trial process.
Psychedelic drugs affect all mental functions: perception, emotion, cognition, body awareness and one’s sense of self. Unlike every other class of drugs, psychedelic drug effects depend heavily on the environment and on the expectations of the subject, which is why combining them with psychotherapy is so vital.
“Psychedelics may be therapeutic to the extent that they elicit processes that are known to be useful in a therapeutic context: transference reactions and working through them; enhanced symbolism and imagery; increased suggestibility; increased contact between emotions and ideations; controlled regression; et cetera,” says psychiatrist Rick Strassman of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, who from 1990 to 1995 performed the first human study using psychedelic drugs in about 20 years, investigating the effects of DMT on 60 human subjects.
Benazir Bhutto’s death is just the latest evidence of the disastrous legacy of western involvement in the country’s politics.
Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:
Last week the portrait of Benazir Bhutto as the last great hope for democracy in Pakistan had barely received its finishing touches in the world media when it was muddied by accusations that the former prime minister had sponsored jihadists in Afghanistan and India-held Kashmir.
Neither assertion is without a measure of truth. Yet both obscure the major events that have rendered Pakistan unstable, even ungovernable, for at least two generations: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979; the American decision to turn Pakistan into the frontline state for a global anti-Soviet jihad; and, more recently, the Bush administration’s corralling of Pakistan into the so-called war on terror.
Like many Asian countries, Pakistan stumbled from primeval chaos into postcolonial life, with an army as its strongest institution – which grew even more formidable after enlisting on the US side in the cold war. Six decades later, it is possible to see how in a less exacting climate Pakistan could have moved durably to civilian rule, as happened in Taiwan and Indonesia, two other pro-American dictatorships frozen by the cold war.
Such, however, was the scale and intensity of the CIA’s programme to arm the Afghan mujahideen that it couldn’t but retard political processes in Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq, who faced disgrace domestically and internationally after his execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, abruptly became a prestigious ally in Washington and London. Emboldened by American patronage, Zia brutally suppressed all opposition, which included some of the country’s greatest writers and artists.
More here. [Thanks to Michael Blim.]
One view that I am writing against in this book, ironically, is the belief that Darwin and the theory of evolution have no place in the social sciences, especially in the study of human social and economic behavior. Whereas scientists are up in arms about attempts to teach creationism and Intelligent Design in public school biology classrooms (see my book Why Darwin Matters), and are distraught by the dismal state of science education and the lack of acceptance of Darwin’s theory (less than half of Americans believe that humans evolved)11, most scientists — especially social scientists — have resisted with the emotional intensity of a creationist any attempts to apply evolutionary thinking to psychology, sociology, and economics. The reason for this resistance — understandable at the time — was the equation of evolutionary theory with Social Darwinism and especially the extreme hereditarian views that led to enforced sterilization of the mentally retarded in America, and to the Nazi eugenics program that led to the Holocaust. As a consequence, post-World War Two social scientists steered a wide course around any attempts to employ evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior, and instead focused almost exclusively on socio-cultural explanations.
A second view that I am writing against is the theory of Homo economicus, which holds that “Economic Man” has unbounded rationality, self-interest, and free will, and that we are selfish, self-maximizing, and efficient in our decisions and choices. When evolutionary thinking and modern psychological theories and techniques are applied to the study of human behavior in the marketplace, we find that the theory of Homo economicus — which has been the bedrock of Traditional Economics — is often wrong or woefully lacking in explanatory power.
More here.
Via Andrew Gelman, a tool to see how close the candidates are to you.
This post against bi-partisanship by Jim Johnson, I agree with (via Crooked Timber):
[W]hy should we endorse bi-partisanship? That is a fundamentally anti-democratic response. Here I am persuaded by argument by political theorists who, following Joseph Schumpeter (whose conception of democracy is, despite common caricatures, neither a ‘realist’ nor ‘minimalist’), insist that robust competition is crucial to a healthy democracy. For instance, Ian Shapiro* suggests that competition has two salutary effects: (i) it allows voters to throw out incumbents (known more appropriately as ‘the bastards’) and (ii) it pressures the opposition to solicit as wide a range of constituencies as they are able. Given these effects, Shapiro suggests quite pointedly:
If competition for power is the lifeblood of democracy, then the search for bi-partisan consensus … is really anticompetitive collusion in restraint of democracy. Why is it that people do not challenge legislation that has bi-partisan backing, or other forms of bi-partisan agreement on these grounds? It is far from clear that there are fewer meritorious reasons to break up the Democratic and Republican parties than there are to break up AT&T and Microsoft.”
Now the final sentence does not follow; we need not break up any particular party and, insofar as they are essential mechanisms of political coordination, that might be self-defeating. What is wanted is vigilance against bi-partisanship and the sort of collusion it embodies.
