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Manukura is a white kiwi bird, the only known white kiwi in the world. She was born at the National Wildlife Centre Pukaha, in New Zealand. 

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art writing cliches to avoid...

from: 30 Art-Writing Clichés to Ditch in the New Year by Ben Davis

Below is my paired down selections or the ones that resonate most with me— (unfortunately I’ve relied on a few these myself—see no. 5, 8, 16 & 19)

4) challenges Particularly in these usages: “challenges the viewer…” or “challenges ideas of….” Very few things are genuinely challenging, particularly when the art crowd is so very blasé about being challenged.

5) concerns Artists are “concerned with issues of representation,” or “tackle concerns of authorship.” They are really “concerned” about these things! It’s super “concerning!”

6) controversial There are artworks that really merit the label “controversial,” but the term is killed by overuse. Just because people are saying mean things about something on Facebook doesn’t mean it is “controversial.” It just means that it is on Facebook.

8) explores Specifically as it refers to the artist’s intention: “She explores ideas of….” In general, if something is still in the exploration phase, then I would give it some more time before writing about it.

15) immersive I take it that the idea of being “immersed” in something is a big, big selling point. Gagosian Gallery described Takashi Murakami’s recent show as an “immersive installation;” but no, it was just full of big things. Which is not the same.

16) informed by To me, when a writer says that an artist’s work was “informed by” a certain set of ideas, that can be translated to, “What this show was about was unclear to me—but then I read the press release and it said the artist had read something.”

17) an inquiry into This is similar to 16, above, but more ambitious. Still, saying an art show is “an inquiry into notions of X and Y…” is a good way to make it sound like a B term paper.

19) interested Artists may well be “interested” in things (or, worse, in “notions” about them)—beauty, sexuality, globalization, the history of art itself—but this is a passionless, clinical way of pitching their work. Artist Steve Lambert has a good essay about why he struck the phrase “I am interested in” from his vocabulary. Personally, when I hear the word, I think of Susan Sontag’s “An Argument About Beauty:” “Imagine saying, ‘That sunset is interesting.’”

26) questions Whether presented as a verb or noun (“X asks questions about…” or “X questions the very notion of…”), it doesn’t matter. Where are the answers, people? Where are the answers??

29) revelatory There is a major case of revelation inflation in art. (I can’t help it: When people start having revelations at the drop of a hat, I start to think of the old Saturday Night Live character, “Orgasm Guy." Now you will too.)

30) rhizomatic Let’s conclude with some more fun with Gagosian press releases: This year, the mega-gallery pitched Nancy Rubins’s monumental sculptures of stuck-together toys as “rhizomatic,” which, as Martha Schwendener pointed out, is all wrong. (The full sentence from the release is, “Geological in scope and metastatic in formation, these rhizomatic structures brim with dark energy”—yikes!) How did an adjective derived from a botanical term for an underground root structure become a way to describe basically anything that looks, you know, really complex? Philosophical duo Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari used the image of the ”rhizome” in their opus A Thousand Plateaus as a way to describe meaning that defies being captured in any linear way. They would probably be spinning in their graves to see it transformed into a glib way to package art.

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You’re putting way too much faith on me. If you slip we’re both screwed and that’s not how I wanna die.

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this is my favorite video on the internet 

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Why ban gay rights and women rights when you can ban westboro Baptist church and the kkk

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Ghost slide the whip. [video]

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Video

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The Land of the Giants, Electrical pylons transformed into statues walking along the Icelandic landscape.

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The black swallower, Chiasmodon niger, is a species of deep sea fish in the family Chiasmodontidae, notable for its ability to swallow fish larger than itself.

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My baby brother’s first girlfriend recently confessed to thinking they were actually a boy. I asked my brother if this bothered him. His response was:

“Well, yeah. If I had have known they were a boy when we were going out, I would have said I had a boyfriend, not a girlfriend.”

He was ten.

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"I can’t be vegan, I love cheese"

Dairy industry is as evil as meat. No less harm for animals. Does it look natural that calf can’t drink milk so you can taste your piece of cheese? 

GO VEGAN.