Andrew Ross is an extraordinarily localised artist, whose body of work has largely focused on his immediate environs of Wellington, New Zealand. He photographs a disappearing city.

Ross does photograph outside Wellington:

Barbara Mensch is best known for her photographs of the old Fulton Fish Market, to which two books have been devoted. She has also photographed the Brooklyn Bridge for nearly 30 years.

From windows facing west and from the roof of her loft, Mensch has views of the Brooklyn Bridge's span and the Municipal Building and the bridge has been a constant in her life and her art.

I tried to find a live video feed of Apple's launch of the iPad in San Francisco early this morning but there was none working. Twitter, however, was full on and I followed the live blogs of the event. Is there actually room for a multitouch screen tablet device between smartphones and laptops? Apple certainly thinks so.

Hence the minimalist designed iPad with synchronisation, wireless and 3G connectivity that functions as a web browser, bookshelf, video player, game console and communication device. It also has the capability to download photos from a camera. It has an entry price of $US500.

This is basically Apple's entry into the netbook market, using the stuff it's learned from the iPhone. Using it will be familiar to anybody who has tried an iPhone: it uses the same combination of swipes, pokes, jabs and sweeps of the finger of its smaller cousin. So sweeping your hand across its reactive 9.7-inch screen will feel satisfying and natural. But it does not have a camera, it means surfing the web without Flash and no multitasking.

There doesn't appear to any significant differences between the iPad and the iPod Touch, other than its size. It is a portable internet, full-fledged media device. Do people want a big iPod touch with e-publishing support? Who is going to use this? Is it for the casual surfer infront of the TV or existing iMac/iPhoners? I'm a Mac user and I'm not sure how this fits into my life. Where does one stick the iPad? I would worry about that glass screen bouncing around in your briefcase or backpack naked?

In A Life More Photographic in Photographies (March 2008) Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis say about an online digital Kodak or Nokia photographic culture that:

The distribution and sharing of snapshots online highlights a paradoxical condition that characterizes snapshot photography: it is both ubiquitous and hidden. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the snapshot has been the archetypal readymade image: placeholder for memories, trophy of sightseeing, produced in their millions by ordinary people to document the rituals of everyday life. And yet despite being the most mass produced photographic product, the snapshot has remained highly private, concealed from public eye, and quite often an invisible image. When snapshots do appear in public, whether in the context of fine art exhibitions and publications or in s stripped of notions of authorship or details about the original purpose of the image, its subjects and the circumstances of its creation.

Clement Greenberg's late Homemade Aesthetics (circa 1971)--roughly the time of the Conceptual Art movement----rests upon upon the substantial body of his earlier work.

One of the assumption of this body of work was his claim about aesthetic judgments and the nature of taste. Greenberg held that taste was involuntary and intuitive in nature, and thus as incorrigible and objective. Involuntary means what we cannot help but do. "You no more choose to like or not like a given item of art than you choose to see the sun as bright or the night as dark," he claims in "Intuition and the Esthetic
Experience". The question to ask here is why are aesthetic judgments involuntary and objective, rather
than being governed by specific theories or individual preferences?

Though Greenberg saw judgments of taste as involuntary, he also saw them as capable of revision or improvement. He conceived of taste as a faculty that could be "developed" or "cultivated" through increasing exposure to art—both through a broadening of the range of experience and through repeated encounters with the same works— and through reflection upon what was seen (or heard, or read).

In Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation in October Vol. 12 (Spring, 1980) Robert Morris says:

The production of art works in this late industrial age has for the most part been circumscribed and structured by the commodity market. Beyond this, most artistic careers follow the contours of a consumer-oriented market: a style is established within which yearly variations occur. These variations do not threaten the style's identity but change subsequent production enough to make it identifiably new. Such a pattern then comes to be seen as natural and value-free rather than a condition of art distribution and sales. Strictures for change under different social conditions might emphasize disjunctive change, or no change at all.The modes for all change, or nonchange, in production, including art, may be limited to three: static, incremental, and disjunctive.

Beyond this, the mode of art paralleling commodity production with its basic style/yearly variation yields good as well as bad art. While this has proven obviously more economically sound for artists than either the static or disjunctive modes, it is probably safe to say that the disjunctive, when effective, for whatever reasons, has been granted greater cultural value, either in terms of individuals or movements. (

I've always had a soft spot for David Bowie's post Ziggy Stardust title track from his Diamond Dogs album. Thgis Bowie the rocker.

The album, the last wheeze of Bowie's glam rock period, is not much as a 1984 concept album. However, —“Diamond Dogs” along with a “Rebel Rebel”—have all the storm and frizzy froth of Ziggy’s best.

I see that Steven Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory argues for the relevance of the beautiful rather than the sublime (and Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the Third Critique. He reverses the postmodern preference for sublime over the beautiful by privileging beauty over the sublime. So what is meant by beauty? A feeling without a concept?

Shaviro says:

Most aesthetics of the past century has been focused on the sublime, and has disparaged the beautiful. This is because the sublime involves a moment of rupture or disproportion, whereas the beautiful seems to involve accommodation, comfort, and proportion. Thus, for instance, Roland Barthes is clearly on the side of jouissance (which is sublime) as opposed to mere plaisir (which corresponds to the beautiful).I argue, however, that Kant’s analytic of the beautiful remains important, because it is really a nascent version of what Deleuze calls singularity. A judgment of beauty is non-cognitive and non-conceptual; beauty is that which cannot be subject to rules, or derived from rules. It is always a singularity or an exception. It cannot be reduced to norms.

On the one hand, 21st century marketing and commodity production seem increasingly to be concerned with questions of “aesthetics”...This is so, both in the manner of Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that “everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense”, and in the way that the aesthetic attributes of our existence have themselves become commodified and marketed, so that today we are incited to purchase, not just tangible commodity objects, but also such things as events, experiences, moods, memories, hopes, and desires.

As we have seen in an earlier post Sontag's early formalist position was that the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling.

Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. n a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”