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YASUMASA MORIMURA, An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Hand Shaped Earring), 2001.

5 Selfies by Artists You Should Know

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Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"

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CARRIE MAE WEEMS. Mirror, Mirror from the series "Ain’t Jokin’," 1987-88, gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 in. International Center of Photography, New York, Gift of Julie Ault, 62.2001. Copyright Carrie Mae Weems.

Carrie Mae Weems' retrospective comes to New York January 24!

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Artists Space Bookstore holds some interesting titles. Check them out sometime.

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My first review! "NOT OVER: 25 Years of Visual AIDS"

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“Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.”

Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

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Ha! I love El Fez's comment to this video "When did you choose to be straight?":

I had a similar discussion years ago and I concluded (this is just my opinion) that being gay was very much like being Canadian. - Some folks are born Canadian. Some folks choose to be Canadian and move there. Some commute back and forth. Some never go at all and would be appalled at the thought of being Canadian. But most folks don't have a problem with Canadians one way or another.

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Origins of "Beware of Artists" meme via artlog:

We’re seeing this poster all over the internet, attributed as an “actual poster issued by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the mid-1950s, at the height of the Red Scare.” Just yesterday the venerable non-profit Artists Space, the Occupy Wall Street Arts & Labor working group, and a few ArtInfo editors shared it on Facebook. Thing is, the poster is a total fabrication—it was never a McCarthy-era poster. It’s a Tumblr-era meme.

The quotation itself has previously circulated as a quote by Queen Victoria, but that’s not right either. It’s actually an out-of-context paraphrase of a letter King Leopold of Belgium wrote to Queen Victoria in 1845. You want to believe it’s a McCarthy poster though, and so did many thousands on Facebook and Tumblr. The slideshow above is a tribute to dangerous artists (add your own in the comments). As the artist Jack Goldstein once wrote, “Dangerous objects are glamorous places to be.”

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"I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland."

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I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn't have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn't the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn't possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

Quoted originally from anonymous, photocopied broadside that was handed around during the 1992 primary season.