Back From Mcleodganj

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUKwdy3jd18

Just got back from Mcleodganj, and no I met no happy people. I just got a splitting back ache and took no significant pictures as well. But I saw this video somewhere and I have to share this, its the funniest thing I have seen in a long time.

The value of Art

Art is a vague and nebulous concept, something like culture. Wikipedia defines it as::

Art is that which is made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind and/or spirit. There is no general agreed-upon definition of art, since defining the boundaries of "art" is subjective, but the impetus for art is often called human creativity.

An artwork is normally assessed in quality by the amount of stimulation it brings about. The impact it has on people, the number of people that can relate to it, the degree of their appreciation, and the effect or influence it has or has had in the past, all accumulate to the 'degree of art.' Most artworks that are widely considered to be "masterpieces" possess these attributes.

And as we all know, masterpieces appreciate with time. I meant monetarily at least. But when I read this, I went into a bit of a tizzy. Its called Excremental Value.

Icon II: Piero Manzoni's Merda d'artista

By John Miller

"If you stuck a piece of shit on the wall, it would be all the same to them as long as someone told them the shit was worth money.That's the nouveau-riche approach"
- Andrea Fraser, performance script for May I Help You? (1991)

Fraser's statement issues from the mouth of a supposed patrician, a woman who might serve on a museum's board of directors. Hers is a provocation meant to distinguish between old money and new, between those with a vast store of cultural capital and those in the business of acquiring as much as they can in the shortest time possible. For the patrician, the acquisitive efficiency of the nouveau riche is odious because the very prospect of ready exchangeability jeopardises long-standing traditions of cultural inheritance. This efficiency, as such, produces a relative indifference to deeply ingrained aesthetic experience. Curiously, her rhetorical substitution of shit for art recapitulates the logic of Piero Manzoni's legendary work Merda d'artista (1961), a provocation of an entirely different order.

Merda d'artista is an edition of 90 signed and numbered works that Manzoni said he made from his own excrement. Each is a 30-gram can of shit, measuring 4.8x6.5cm, "freshly preserved, produced and tinned", as stated on the label. This information appears in Italian, French, German and English, against a background pattern produced by repeating the artist's name in block letters. Because Manzoni sold each can by weight at gold's daily market price, the shit literally became worth its weight in gold. In retrospect, this has proved to be a bargain. At $35.20 (£18.07) per ounce - the price at which the London Gold Pool (an international consortium of central banks) wanted to fix the precious metal - a tin originally would have cost about $37. That was 1961. Thirty years later, Sotheby's auctioned one for $67,000. Then, the price of gold had climbed to $374 per ounce. If Manzoni's initial pricing scheme still held, it should have cost only $395.77. In other words, in 1991 Merda d'artista had outperformed gold in price by more than 70 times.

The virtues of being laid up

I havent been blogging for some time, initially due to severe back pain and later due to lassitude and the inability to walk around like I used to once. Thankfully, I think I think I am getting better now. And as a result i am spending a lot of time (too much In Fact!!) in front of the computer and have been downloading some wierd stuff online. One of these is a High-Dynamic Range (HDR) software by the name of Qtpfsgui. And as I was playing around with It, I made that surreal, crazy looking picture of the Gandhi Bhawan above. Sure the software is fairly buggy and crashes occasionally but it does get me some interesting results.
Now back to the back, after rest and analgesics, I have been on medium wave diathermy, hot fomentation and even homeopathic medications. Anything to avoid the surgeon's knife and the prospect of going into general anaesthesia and not waking up later freaks me out. Anyone has any ideas, let me know.
Until that time, I am invalidated, unboozed and medicated. In short, completely useless. It breaks my heart to see my D200 gathering dust.