Political senility, press servility....Krazy, man.
18/07/08 02:45
Summary only available
when permalinks are enabled.
A take on
John McCain, our servile national media, and
why the senior senator will likely win...
And on the lighter side of US electoral politics - of you can call it that - another ingenious video from the folks at the Onion....
And from the Vancouver Courier...a review of Krazy!, an exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery until September. Well worth seeing if you're living in the area.
KRAZ¥!
In 1917, the French artist Marcel Duchamp ignited controversy when he submitted a urinal to an art show, signed “R. Mutt.” The attempts by early European surrealists and Dadaists to shock the boobosie seem quaint today. Anyone channel-surfing with a remote encounters more random associations in five minutes than Tristan Tzara and his Viennese coffee clatch could dream up in a year.
On top of that, even daily life now has a rubbery, Dali-like feel to it - even here in Vancouver, a place notable for artistic indifference. As a cartoon in the Georgia Straight noted, where else can you ski, surf and get tasered by three separate police forces all in one day? It’s no longer art that shocks us, it’s the authorities.
Speaking of cartoons, this month the Vancouver Art Gallery has thrown a few new things against the walls, and I think they’re going to stick – at least in the memories of younger visitors. “Krazy! The delirious world of anime + comics + video games” takes its name from New York cartoonist George Herriman’s brilliant jazz age comic strip, Krazy Kat. The show runs from now until September.
VAG had the wisdom to involve two cartoonists in curating the show: the Canadian-born Seth, and the Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman, best known for the graphic novel Maus and his nineties-era New Yorker covers. Named by Time magazine as one of the “10 most influential people of our times,” Spiegelman commenced the exhibit’s opening with a talk at the Centre for Digital Media.
In his New York accent, the bearded, bespectacled author made some unexpected connections in his talk. One insight came when he looked up the definition of “story.” “Story comes from medieval Latin. It refers specifically to the picture windows in churches. That's why we get the same word for story being a building and story being a narrative.” The templates for comics, with their succession of boxed pictures, can be found in the stained glass windows that honour “the first superhero who turned water into wine.”
Comics, the “bastard children of art and commerce,” as Spiegelman calls them, have never been the royal road to early retirement - with a few notable exceptions. The author showed a turn of the century advertisement that claimed a cartoonist could make twenty to a hundred dollars a week. “That still remains true a hundred years later,” he observed. The audience found the remark funnier than I did.
A few days later I dropped in for a look at Krazy! along with The Province’s Dan Murphy (a big-shot cartoonist who makes twenty dollars a week more than me). Venturing into the exhibit is like voyaging into the guts of a giant, postmodern, pinball machine. Even if your interest in anime, comics and video games is minimal, you’ll probably still find it worth a visit. We’ve all seen Matisse, da Vinci and the usual suspects many times over in shows and reproductions; here’s a chance to get a first-hand look at the work of Mad magazine artist Harvey Kurtzmann, graphic artist Chris Ware, and animator Marv Newland.
By honouring visual forms once considered beneath adult contempt, Krazy! makes the case that arguments about high art versus low art are best left to the graying appraisers on Antiques Roadshow.
But whimsy still doesn’t go over well in the art scene. Curators and critics like to keep it real – as in real serious. So it’s no surprise there’s a heavy representation in the exhibit of the darker, more alienated work of male graphic artists, much of it executed with levels of draftsmanship unknown in the respectable arts world. You want “Krazy”? Look no further than the bizarre “Binky Brown Versus the Virgin Mary,” an autobiographical, early seventies comic book about a suburban teenager’s lapsed faith. (This part of the show, Dan Murphy observed, could have been titled “I Need a Girlfriend.”)
Krazy! expertly captures the Cambrian explosion of forms currently taking place in mass media. Editorial cartoonists and strip cartoonists may be struggling away in the primordial soup of newsprint, but there’s no shortage of evolution in graphic novels and animation.
Video games are a whole other thing. In one of the galleries, Krazy! has screens and monitors devoted to the touchstones of gaming: Pacman, Civilization, and their trigger-happy descendents. One wall displays monitors with game imagery of guns blasting away at targets.
For good or ill, the designers of the shoot ‘em ups and multi-user games are becoming the unacknowledged legislators of popular culture. Even Hollywood movies aimed at kids are taking their pace and their plots from video games, and vice versa. The cultural creatives have the residual ability to shock, but they’re not doing by signing names on urinals – they’re doing it by rendering hookers for Grand Theft Auto.
And on an upbeat note....a worldwide hit, worth posting for the benefit of the few who haven't seen it yet...
And on the lighter side of US electoral politics - of you can call it that - another ingenious video from the folks at the Onion....
And from the Vancouver Courier...a review of Krazy!, an exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery until September. Well worth seeing if you're living in the area.
KRAZ¥!
In 1917, the French artist Marcel Duchamp ignited controversy when he submitted a urinal to an art show, signed “R. Mutt.” The attempts by early European surrealists and Dadaists to shock the boobosie seem quaint today. Anyone channel-surfing with a remote encounters more random associations in five minutes than Tristan Tzara and his Viennese coffee clatch could dream up in a year.
On top of that, even daily life now has a rubbery, Dali-like feel to it - even here in Vancouver, a place notable for artistic indifference. As a cartoon in the Georgia Straight noted, where else can you ski, surf and get tasered by three separate police forces all in one day? It’s no longer art that shocks us, it’s the authorities.
Speaking of cartoons, this month the Vancouver Art Gallery has thrown a few new things against the walls, and I think they’re going to stick – at least in the memories of younger visitors. “Krazy! The delirious world of anime + comics + video games” takes its name from New York cartoonist George Herriman’s brilliant jazz age comic strip, Krazy Kat. The show runs from now until September.
VAG had the wisdom to involve two cartoonists in curating the show: the Canadian-born Seth, and the Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman, best known for the graphic novel Maus and his nineties-era New Yorker covers. Named by Time magazine as one of the “10 most influential people of our times,” Spiegelman commenced the exhibit’s opening with a talk at the Centre for Digital Media.
In his New York accent, the bearded, bespectacled author made some unexpected connections in his talk. One insight came when he looked up the definition of “story.” “Story comes from medieval Latin. It refers specifically to the picture windows in churches. That's why we get the same word for story being a building and story being a narrative.” The templates for comics, with their succession of boxed pictures, can be found in the stained glass windows that honour “the first superhero who turned water into wine.”
Comics, the “bastard children of art and commerce,” as Spiegelman calls them, have never been the royal road to early retirement - with a few notable exceptions. The author showed a turn of the century advertisement that claimed a cartoonist could make twenty to a hundred dollars a week. “That still remains true a hundred years later,” he observed. The audience found the remark funnier than I did.
A few days later I dropped in for a look at Krazy! along with The Province’s Dan Murphy (a big-shot cartoonist who makes twenty dollars a week more than me). Venturing into the exhibit is like voyaging into the guts of a giant, postmodern, pinball machine. Even if your interest in anime, comics and video games is minimal, you’ll probably still find it worth a visit. We’ve all seen Matisse, da Vinci and the usual suspects many times over in shows and reproductions; here’s a chance to get a first-hand look at the work of Mad magazine artist Harvey Kurtzmann, graphic artist Chris Ware, and animator Marv Newland.
By honouring visual forms once considered beneath adult contempt, Krazy! makes the case that arguments about high art versus low art are best left to the graying appraisers on Antiques Roadshow.
But whimsy still doesn’t go over well in the art scene. Curators and critics like to keep it real – as in real serious. So it’s no surprise there’s a heavy representation in the exhibit of the darker, more alienated work of male graphic artists, much of it executed with levels of draftsmanship unknown in the respectable arts world. You want “Krazy”? Look no further than the bizarre “Binky Brown Versus the Virgin Mary,” an autobiographical, early seventies comic book about a suburban teenager’s lapsed faith. (This part of the show, Dan Murphy observed, could have been titled “I Need a Girlfriend.”)
Krazy! expertly captures the Cambrian explosion of forms currently taking place in mass media. Editorial cartoonists and strip cartoonists may be struggling away in the primordial soup of newsprint, but there’s no shortage of evolution in graphic novels and animation.
Video games are a whole other thing. In one of the galleries, Krazy! has screens and monitors devoted to the touchstones of gaming: Pacman, Civilization, and their trigger-happy descendents. One wall displays monitors with game imagery of guns blasting away at targets.
For good or ill, the designers of the shoot ‘em ups and multi-user games are becoming the unacknowledged legislators of popular culture. Even Hollywood movies aimed at kids are taking their pace and their plots from video games, and vice versa. The cultural creatives have the residual ability to shock, but they’re not doing by signing names on urinals – they’re doing it by rendering hookers for Grand Theft Auto.
And on an upbeat note....a worldwide hit, worth posting for the benefit of the few who haven't seen it yet...
