craftastic.

I spent the weekend reading too much of what I don’t enjoy. I struggled my way through a stilted interview with two academics, thinking it would be good for me. It reminded me of the intellectual-boy equivalent of those conversations my pothead brothers have, where they trade a steady stream of quotes back and forth from Judd Apatow movies, Jay-Z, The Daily Show, and Chris Rock routines. Heidegger! De Saussure! Deleuzian! Robbe-frickin-Grillet! Like dueling guitar solo-theoretical-one-upmanship. When my brothers do this I always feel I don’t really need to be here, do I? I think the reason people don’t read criticism is that criticism doesn’t really want people to read it. 

I made a mediocre dinner involving bacon and brussel sprouts. I know, how can it be mediocre when there’s bacon involved? I don’t know, I managed it somehow. 

I finished a print:

And started another one. 

I went to the Museum of Arts and Design and wondered why, when they started blurring the lines between art, design, and craft, somehow the word craft got erased.

Their new show is over-installed and not as  exciting as the last two cutting-edge craft shows they’ve done. It’s very one-liner, as in, look! It’s an obsessively made sculpture made out of a whole lot of buttons! There’s one made of sunglasses! There’s one made of shoes! Plastic spoons! record albums! plastic combs! and on and on like that, and there’s condescending wall text everywhere telling you why it matters that there’s so many plastic spoons. 

But then there is a great piece made of accumulated five and dime junk store shiny things, lots of different kinds of shiny things, built up into a series of three or four, i don’t know, sort of like a combination of spaceship and boat, and when you walk around them all of a sudden you realize that hidden inside is a little baby doll peering out, aiming a machine gun at you. It’s like a nest for a very angry magpie. It’s great, though of course I didn’t write down the name of the artist. 

I finished this: 

Which is how I used to live, five million years ago.