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Our Freedom is Fragile: Lessons From the Jewish Children Who Fled Nazi Germany. “America is no longer a country of refuge but one that is preying upon its most vulnerable inhabitants, including children, who stand to suffer the most…”

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in The Brooklyn Rail, artist Alexi Worth writes about Manet painting his subjects in full frontal light. It connects contemporary critics' revulsion and his figures to his interest in photography. No one's mentioned it because we're all soaking in frontal light now.

image: one of like three early photos of Manet's Olympia, 1865-68, in an album in the collection of the Bibliotheque National de France

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ah excellent, here is a streetview image of the dc zombie chinatown location from 2015

I LOVE YOU CORDELIA CUPP!! I LOVE YOU!! SHE IS EVERYTHING TO ME!!

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you know that phenomenon where vaccines are so effective that people forget how scary the original disease was? I think Americans are like this about government

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fun fact: when they destroyed chinatown in downtown dc to build an arena, the zoning regulations required that all the national chain stores nonetheless display bilingual chinese/english signage. the chinese characters for hooters translated as 'owl restaurant'

I LOVE YOU CORDELIA CUPP!! I LOVE YOU!! SHE IS EVERYTHING TO ME!!

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While some have argued that the bad kerning is actually a gesture of humility under God, there’s no evidence of similar kerning errors in other papal tombs. Cheryl Jacobsen, a calligrapher and adjunct assistant professor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, calls the engraving “horrifically bad,” noting that “there is no historical reason for spacing that bad.”

- The kerning on the pope’s tomb is a travesty - Fast Company

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James Lee Byars, Invitation pour une performance, (gold letters on black cardboard), [1975] [Centre Pompidou, Paris. © Estate James Lee Byars, Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner, Köln and New York, NY. Photo: Philippe Migeat/Centre Pompidou]

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bought by the american medical association from the estate of robert mapplethorpe in 1989, this lumpy bronze by james lee byars has really been some places.

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we're in a brief window in history where you can call someone nothing but a bag of heuristics, and it'll stop them in their tracks

New techniques for probing large language models—part of a growing field known as “mechanistic interpretability”—show researchers the way these AIs do mathematics, learn to play games or navigate through environments. In a series of recent essays, Mitchell argued that a growing body of work shows that it seems possible models develop gigantic “bags of heuristics,” rather than create more efficient mental models of situations and then reasoning through the tasks at hand. (“Heuristic” is a fancy word for a problem-solving shortcut.)

When Keyon Vafa, an AI researcher at Harvard University, first heard the “bag of heuristics” theory, “I feel like it unlocked something for me,” he says. “This is exactly the thing that we’re trying to describe.”

- We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All - WSJ

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Rebecca Horn

Booklet Rebecca Horn Published on Apr 27, 2020 Publisher logo Studio Trisorio https://issuu.com/studiotrisorio/docs/rebecca_horn

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You can only reblog this today.

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The curators of the Smithsonian's exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres portrait-related works have put out a bilingual book about the process of creating new versions of "Untitled" 1989, the artist's text-based portraits. Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Final Revenge (A Workbook) also lays out their and the artist's process, so you can make your own. There's even a pencil.

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One Hour of Mon Mothma Dancing. “Sir, we have located the Rebel bass.” (This song by Succession theme song composer Nicholas Britell is a banger!)

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TIL the glass wedges in Jacob Kassay's glass wedge and library book sculptures can roam like a hermit crab from precisely fitted book to precisely fitted book. If you buy the one in the Printed Matter benefit auction, you'll get a wooden dummy wedge to help find the right format book.

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Robert Rauschenberg was one of 100 artists commissioned by the Goethe Institute Osaka to make a kite, which would be flown in a "vernissage in the sky" over Himeji Castle in 1989. It was all sponsored by Lufthansa, and after a global exhibition tour, the Art Kites were to be auctioned off, with the proceeds going to the UN Disaster Relief Fund. The catalogue's at the Internet Archive.

Funny story, the Goethe Institute guy who organized the art kites just kept them instead, and 12 years after he died, his family sold them for EUR5.7million.

images: robert rauschenberg, sky house ii, via rrf; lufthansa kite, because flying is art; gerhard richter art kite, which, according to his catalogue raisonné, may be a kite, but is not art; and yoshio kitayama's art kite, which was the best one imho

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theo van gogh was the one who suggested that his older brother vincent start seriously painting. as soon as theo was gainfully employed he gave vincent around 15% of his own yearly salary for art supplies, lodging, and food. about 2/3rds of vincent's surviving letters were to theo (including vincent's earliest and last letters), all of which were found stored in theo's desk. theo's child, vincent willem, was born on january 31st, 1890, and vincent was so delighted by his nephew that he painted almond blossoms for him. vincent shot himself half a year later on july 29th, 1890. theo's distress at his brother's death worsened his syphilis symptoms and he died half a year after his brother on january 25th, 1891 (four days before vincent willem's first birthday). theo was reburied next to vincent in auvers-sur-oise at the request of theo's wife johanna.