W B Yeats - 3 Quarks Daily

by Akim Reinhardt

I’ve always found the notion of a handful of Swedes deciding the world’s best anything to be ludicrous, even laughable. Well, not always. When I was a kid, a teenager, I thought the Nobel Prizes must be important and mean something. But by my twenties, they had started to seem like a joke.

Nothing against Sweden or its fine denizens, of course. A lot of us would probably very much enjoy living there. But that’s precisely because it’s hard to think of a country less representative of the global human experience. Almost any other country you could name is a truer sampling of the global human experience than this one, with its roughly 0.1% of humanity perched near the top of the world.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s different in the sciences. Maybe in that realm a Nobel Prize signifies something other than an ego trip and a fat check. I’m no scientist. I don’t even really understand how gravity works; if you told me it’s because there’s some big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth holding us down, I’d probably muse: “Huh, should probably get a little more iron in my diet.”

How ‘bout that. Turns out there is a big ‘ole magnet at the center of the Earth. Pass the brocolli.

Maybe Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was just kidding when in his memoir he named a chapter about the Nobel Prize in Physics: “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake” (his invention of dynamite being the other). Perhaps in the sciences the Nobel is a meaningful brand of lifetime achievement award for worthy scientists who have made important contributions to our understanding and applications of physics, chemistry and biology/medicine. But not geology, oceanography, mathematics, or a bunch of other sciences. Cause fuck those branches of science?

I don’t know. At least they’re not handing out Nobels to the social sciences. How ridiculous would that be?

Oh wait. They are. But not. Kinda. It’s confusing. Read more »

by Sue Hubbard

He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Extract from ‘Easter’, 1916, W B Yeats

Duty-Free-SpiritsSmall When we meet to discuss his work we have to decamp from the pub in Camberwell, which is both Mat Collishaw’s studio and stylish home, to a local café, as his apartment has been let out to a well known London store for a shoot and is full of rampaging children. But before we leave he shows me his new paintings. At first glance they appear to be abstract, constructed on a modernist grid, though the lines, in fact, are folds, creases left in the small square wraps of paper used to sell cocaine. These wraps have been torn from glossy magazines; there’s a woman’s foot in a high-heeled shoe resting on a glass table, and adverts for Fendi and Gucci. The subtext seems to be that these aspirational trappings are the spectral presence of an endless illusion that functions much like an addiction to drugs. You’re always left wanting more. The work is about debasement; the debasement of modernist painting as a form and as a result of the recent financial excesses that have led to the current economic crisis. This tension between the beautiful and the abject, between the promise of a possible paradise and the profane is central to all Mat Collishaw’s work. As the Marquis de Sade once said: “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image”.

Tag: W B Yeats

The Big Door Prize

Monday, March 4, 2013

A Terrible Beauty: Mat Collishaw