Eugenia uniflora Surinam Cherry, potentially invasive.
AG2020_1960250a
Taiso Yoshitoshi
Left: Kenshin Watches Geese in the Moonlight
General Kenshin, a brilliant strategist, watches geese and successfully changes battle plans based on their formation.
Right: Gamo Sadahide’s Servant, Toki Motosada, Hurls a Demon King to the Ground at Mount Inohana
Motosada sees phantoms cavorting, and one possesses a wooden temple guardian. He grapples with the guardian, and when he throws it down, the apparitions vanish.
Brave Warriors and Fantastic Tales: The World According to Yoshitoshi
January 15–May 31, 2020.
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Among the last great ukiyo-e artists of Meiji Japan, Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) reigned supreme for his daring prints based on various tales and legends of ancient Japan and China. He made use of Western colors and inks for dramatic effect, yet stayed loyal to the woodblock print techniques that had guided past masters. In his short life, he created numerous series exploring a multiplicity of themes related to Japan’s rich history. In Brave Warriors, legendary warriors of Japan come to life to bring honor to themselves and their masters. In One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, exquisitely attired men and women are cast as theatrical players in settings that evoke melancholy, romance, and bravery. Fantastic creatures inhabit his series known as Thirty-Six Ghosts, featuring figures that both frighten and amuse the viewer with their dramatic design.
This exhibition is made possible through a generous gift from Fernàn Franz Steiner, whose donation of his personal collection of prints greatly enhances the BAMPFA holdings of nearly two thousand woodblock prints.
Fotos contra la covid
150 photographers have donated one of their images to fight the pandemic and the money raised will go to the emergency fund COVID-19 of Doctors Without Borders @medicossinfronteras.espana
Exceptionally and for 7 days only you can buy this 20cm x 30cm photograph printed on Fine Art Canson paper for only € 100. Until April 30th.
El proyecto está coordinado por Jordi Pizarro y Eloisa D’Orsi, en colaboración con un pequeño equipo de profesionales que participan a título voluntario: Serena de Sanctis, Sarah Wiedman y Gianluca Battista.
The photos.
Untitled (Here, in a place where time has crossed and left a breathy stain — JW)
Untitled (Here, in a place where time has crossed and left a breathy stain — JW), 2020. Graphite, acrylic and enamel paint, color pencil, gesso, and solvent transfer on paper. 15 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery.
People’s Party with Talib Kweli
Show by UPROXX on hip-hop, et al.
Art Monsters: On Beauty and Excess
“Chatto & Windus has acquired an “explosive” non-fiction book, dubbed part cultural history, part feminist manifesto and part memoir, from The Wylie Agency.
Clara Farmer, publishing director at Chatto & Windus, has acquired, on proposal, world all-language rights to Art Monsters: On Beauty and Excess by Lauren Elkin, from Alba Ziegler- Bailey at The Wylie Agency.
“Art Monsters is an explosive reflection on the lives of creative women and the necessity of transgression. In the old days an ‘art monster’ was a man attended to by an ‘angel in the house’ so that he could concentrate solely on artistic concerns. But what happens when the angel is also an art monster herself – how do these women occupy both roles, fearlessly?” said the publisher. “Lauren Elkin’s riveting new book looks at women in culture – in art, literature, music and fashion – and how so often they are found wanting, either for failing to live up to impossible expectations, or for exceeding them so radically that they become ‘too much’. But this monstrousness can create its own power. From riot grrrl to Pussy Riot, from Louise Bourgeois to Audre Lorde, Art Monsters is a celebration of women making art that aims to provoke, that delights in all that is crass, grotesque, too big and too loud.”
Full manuscript to be delivered early 2020. US rights have been sold to FSG; German and Korean deals have also been secured. ” via thebookseller.
[ArtForum] Hannah Black and Philippe van Parijs discuss Universal Basic Income
From ArtForum, April 2020:
HB: For newcomers, could you give a brief introduction to UBI?
Philippe van Parijs: A UBI—short for universal or unconditional basic income—is an income paid at regular intervals to all members of a community on an individual basis, without means-testing or work conditions.
[…]In this extraordinary era of crisis, isn’t it possible to envisage far more generous UBI measures than previously imagined?
When the economy is struggling, there is, by definition, less room for generosity than when it is thriving. But, as happened with the Great Depression and World War II, a crisis can trigger imagination and boldness. The result can be an institutional setup better equipped to forestall future crises or make them less disruptive. Earlier crises produced our welfare states and the European Union. This one could lead to the introduction of an unconditional basic income.
[…]A UBI can be described as a “social dividend,” an equal dividend paid to all members of a society as equal joint owners of all its means of production. For this reason, its introduction and expansion amounts to making an economic regime more socialist…
[…]Is there any way that UBI could represent a way out of capitalism, rather than a way to maintain it?
Because the distinction between capitalism and socialism covers a continuum, there is no “way out of capitalism,” but there are many ways in which our economic regime could be made less capitalist. Because a UBI amounts to collectivizing—as a “social dividend”—part of the profits of the economy, it makes the economy less capitalist.
But socialism is no more an aim in itself than capitalism is. For Marx, a socialist revolution was necessary not because it would make society more just but because it would make the economy more efficient. The maximal development of the productive forces is needed to bring about as soon as possible a situation in which people would contribute voluntarily according to their capacities and consume free of charge according to their needs. A UBI consists precisely in approximating this situation without waiting for a socialist revolution: The higher the income is, the more everyone’s needs will be covered unconditionally and the more people will produce what is needed without being forced to do so.
[…]I strongly believe in the importance of working out, proposing, and subjecting to a critical discussion what I call realistic utopias. These are not wild dreams of a better world. They are specific proposals for more or less radical reforms that are resolutely “utopian” in the sense of not being politically achievable here and now. But they are “realistic” in the sense that they take people as they are—not as we wish they were—or as freedom-respecting institutions could plausibly make them. What drives the search for such realistic utopias is the indignation with some aspects of our capitalist societies, even those undeniably made less unjust by a strong regulation of the market and the development of a welfare state: avoidable misery, humiliation, unjustifiable inequality within and between countries, consumerism, oppressive work relations, environmental degradation, etc. The challenge is to design economic institutions that reduce these evils as much as possible, but without just dreaming them: by taking seriously the strongest objections that can be made to them from whatever discipline.