techyum ::

Leave it to the snarky kids over at Some Ecards to lay a beatdown on Google Plus and Netflix for Halloween. Yes, they have more.

After seeing the selection of NY MOMA (New York Museum of Modern Art) comment cards as separated out by child visitors, it seems that the museum does please overall, yet still leaves quite a bit to be desired in the dinosaur department. You can see all the “I went to MOMA and…” cards here, but my favorite selections are in the MOMA post where they made a gallery of all the responses from kids. I’ll be the first to suggest that all art, film and TV be critiques exclusively on paper with No. #2 pencils by the under-12 set. Vegetemoose for the win. Someone call Arianna Huffington, as we’ve found a crop of tastemakers to fill the ranks of TV and film bloggers she can’t seem to replace on those AOL brands she’s managing…

Where the Tweet meets the street… Connecticut based artist Ted Mikulski seems to always have some kind of art project going, even if the title of his book is “Art Is Dead.” Apparently not, as it looks like the artist has been busy with a little side project where tweets are taken out of context on Twitter, turned into stickers, and placed into real-life contexts that give a new depth and scope to the original writer’s 140 characters. And they’re a little pranky, too, which we love. (Thanks, E!)

• Urban Tweet Art by Ted Mikulski

Do you crave that special combination of glurgy weirdness and comforting predictability that only the Family Circus can provide? But do you worry about the permanent injury on your IQ inflicted by every viewing of that classic cartoon?

Why not inoculate yourself against Family Circus-induced brain damage by pairing that candy-apple morning-paper nightmare with the kind of bewildering yet possibly profound statements of German philosophy that probably sound so familiar to you because you think maybe you’ve heard Bruce Willis spilling them in interviews? Why not get the irresistible cuteness of Family Circus while chuckling at bold pronouncements about human experience and howling merrily, “Too true!”

Why not? Head on over to The Nietzche Family Circus, and that’s exactly what you’ll get: “The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.” What easier way could there be to sort of learn philosophy while mining random chance for juicy sig quotes sure to win you status among your friends who have heard that Nietzche is cool?

But the best thing about The Nietzche Family Circus is this: hit “Refresh” 100 times and you’ll not only be way, way smarter; you’ll be just a little more German. Gesundheit!

This is not, of course, the first time the smarmy mopes of Family Circus have been abused. Back in ’99, web developer Greg Galcik shut down The Dysfunctional Family Circus, a more broadly-themed orgy of satanic rituals and cannibalism, after a 90-minute phone call from Family Circus creator Bil Keane.

But surely Keane (now 88) would be able to see that in this case his images are being used for niceness, instead of evil, right? Right?

[Via Susie Bright.]

From H+ Magazine.

David Moye’s AOLNews post on the project Mutate or Die: A W.S. Burroughs Biotechnical Bestiary, from artists Adam Zaretsky and Tony Allard, hurts my BRAIN. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover. Moye summarizes an article by the artists published last week in H+ Magazine. Here’s the shit, from Moye:

Zaretsky, who has a background in biotech, and Allard, a college professor in San Diego, say their plan is to “take a glob” of the preserved poop, isolate the DNA and make lots of copies of it.

After that, they will soak the DNA dust in gold dust and load it into a “gene gun,” a modified air pistol used to insert DNA into plants, worms, rats and humans for experiments.

The DNA dust collected from the poop will be loaded into the pistol, which will then be shot into a mix of blood, poop and semen and then, according to the artists, be declared either a “living bio-art,” a “new media print,” a “living cut-up literary device” or a mutant sculpture.

Allard admits the concept is, for many people, like poop itself: not easy to grasp even if you’re fully aware of its purpose.

[Link.]

“Not easy to grasp?” You can mother!#%$#$%@#@ing say that again, people. But then, Burroughs tended to have that effect on people even when he wasn’t a shit-borne mutant covered in gold dust and pumped up a worm’s bejeezus.

I’m perplexed by this project on a number of levels — first, that I was unaware you could really get viable DNA from poop, in cloning terms. Turns out my misgivings are right; Moye quotes Allard as saying, “The amount of DNA in the s–t is fairly minuscule; it’s more like the DNA of what was in his gut at the time.”

So when the army of mutant Burroughs worms takes over the world, you should know that they’re actually worms mutated by the DNA of the E. coli spewing from Burroughs’ asshole, not so much by Burroughs himself.

But hey, aren’t we all what we eat?

A Russian guerrilla art group called Voina (which means “War” in Russian) has been nominated for a state-sponsored prize, even as two members are incarcerated awaiting trial for their part in an “art” project in which police cars were flipped over.

But it wasn’t the flipping of the cop cars that got Voina nominated for the Innovations Prize from the Russian Ministry of Culture and the Center for Modern Art. It was their project to erect a 65-meter male organ, as illustrated in the above video — which some helpful soul has set to The Dance of the Prince & the Sugar Plum Fairy. Here’s the short version, from rian.ru:

Voina was nominated for a piece of performance art that saw a 65 meter phallus painted on a bridge opposite the St. Petersburg headquarters of the Federal Security Services (FSB), the heir to the KGB. The penis was painted at night and flipped up in front of the building – and stunned officers – when the bridge was raised.

British artist Banksy recently donated over $120,000 to the group, which also famously staged an orgy in a Moscow museum to mark President Dmitry Medvedev’s 2008 inauguration. The group has also thrown live cats at McDonald’s workers to “relieve” the tedium of the working-day.

The group say they are dedicated to the “destruction of outdated repressive-patriarchal socio-political symbols and ideologies.”

[Link.]

Yes, that does say “started an orgy in the Moscow Museum.”

The penis prank was committed in June, 2010, and made it all the way to western blogs like Animal New York and Laughing Squid — and that, my friends, is a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig penis. Animal New York even has information about how the stunt was performed.

As for the police cars, the trial of the two accused is on February 28. Animal New York related that event, too, and Global Post has an article about it. There are some photos of the event on Wonder How To, though the video is no longer accessible.

The Innovations Award carries an award of a quarter-million rubles, which is about US$8,500.

The spirit of online group participation and collaboration is perhaps one of the more virtuous aspects of living an ever more connected, digital life. (Well that and the constant on-tap availability of free high-def streamed pr0n.)

The internet has afforded us the ability as individuals to work as a group to achieve amazing things we could not otherwise achieve on our own. Examples include creating a free and democratic(ish) encyclopedia, searching for a missing computer scientist lost at sea, analyzing radio waves from space in the search of alien life.

“Five Hundred Lines” is a visual exploration in the trials and tribulations of what happens when 500 people work together to perform a simple task – tracing a line. Each user is only shown the line the previous participant traced, so over time the line morphs and changes based on the how accurately each person performs their task.

Functioning as both a piece of art and a scientific experiment, the resultant video provides a demonstration of diligence, care and eye-for-detail through to outright sabotage of the task in hand. With each significant change in the course of the line we have to wonder whether the participant was adding their own personality, was simply not adept at the exercise or was essentially ‘trolling’ the task at hand.

What we are left with is essentially a visual game of Chinese whispers.

I think we can draw parallels from this video that occur in any group task or online community. The majority of participants carry out the task with a degree of care and positive spirit. Some spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy to input the highest level of quality into the project. Others intentionally troll, destroy and wreck the project for whatever reason.

This task fails to have any self-healing mechanisms in place – participants are not, for example, shown the original line or even an aggregate of the previous lines. Good online collaboration projects have such fail safes built in – wikipedia has version control that can be compared and rolled back, tasks like the search for Jim Gray or Seti make sure multiple participants see the same piece of data and respond with the same conclusion.

It would be interesting to see the 500 lines experiment performed again with some kind of self-healing and compare the final line drawing from each study.

Screencap of "The 19XX" entry page.

The 19XX is a dieselpunk webcomic that updates with two pages every other Wednesday. It relates the adventures of a secret group commissioned by the League of Nations after the Great War to scour the globe to find magic artifacts, undiscovered superweapons, and dangerous magic spells before the next war. Drawn by a web designer named, as far as I can tell, “Kopetkai,” it’s just plain oodles of fun.

You can start at the beginning with the evocatively beautiful entry page (and be sure to turn your speaker on or put your headphones in). You can also “like” the comic on Facebook.

The “About the Comic” page tells it thusly:

Not long after the end of the Great War, those who were capable of hearing it, received a revelation… another Great War was coming…

…A weak League of Nations banded together to form a group. A group capable of doing what those countries could not. A group of adventurers, explorers, and scientists from every allied country to search the globe and fight a battle far from the public eye. This group is The 19XX, all the public has been told is that they are fighting for all of the good in humanity to survive the nineteen hundreds and beyond.

Their mission is to track down every powerful relic, every modern and undiscovered weapon, and every magic incantation ever uttered on the earth’s crust, because the forces of evil responsible for the next Great War would be searching for the very same thing. Nothing in the realm of the tangible or intangible is off limits when the fate of the entire world is at stake.

[Link.]

Because comics and pulp fiction were where the really wonderful adventures of the late ’20s and the ’30s were happening, to my  mind, comics are the place where this genre belongs. Like the genre overall, 19XX brings in an overall Art Deco look and gorgeous influences from places like TinTin and German Expressionism.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “dieselpunk” is the interbellum (1920-1940) version of “steampunk.” It’s a term for modern science fiction that memorializes previous dreams of the future. Instead of spinning off from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, dieselpunk is spun off of 1920s and 1930s adventure pulp, with science fiction and fantasy elements out of Doc Savage, The Shadow and Buck Rogers, with some Weimar-era Germanic and Hindu mysticism thrown in.

If you need an example, the first three Indiana Jones films were probably, because of the fantasy elements in each story, dieselpunk, though really only peripherally. Those aside, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was the best promoted (not to mention most ham-handed and inexpert, if you ask me) attempt yet to realize a purely dieselpunk vision on the screen. Disney’s film The Rocketeer was, to my mind, much more successful, and in fact it’s based on a comic as well. It bombed at the box office — ahead of its time?

Damn straight it’s ahead of its time — it’s all ahead of its time. It’s as ahead of its time as a Super Proton Spazzer Ray mounted on a Henderson.

From the J.X. Williams Archive.

Never heard of him? You’re not alone! But when I tell you that he’s the director of Nunf*cker, you will surely say “Oh! Yes!! Of course!!! I’ve been meaning to rent that!”

Now, whether underground filmmaker J.X. Williams is real or fake, I don’t know and don’t particularly give a damn, which is why I just spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out. But the fact that the hoax has now continued for several years is fascinating — as is the fact that the hoaxster(s) chose as a name for his/her/their/its fictional exploitation-filmmaker the name of a prolific collective pseudonym used to write gay smut. That’s lent credence to some hilarious claims in this Rumpus interview which pretty much spells it out if you read between the lines. So does this, which is by Lawrence himself — and it’s pretty inspired.

Back to the beginning: When, for some reason, I started getting promotional emails from “The J.X. Williams Archive” a few years back, it’s not so much that I thought I was being hoaxed as that I didn’t, for one damn instant, think I wasn’t being hoaxed. I still don’t, but I am confused as to just what the point is.

Purported to be an underground director of Mafia-financed nudie films and grindcore exploitation flicks, the guy sounds too much like what Kilgore Trout would have become, if Kurt Vonnegut had been a sex addict and hardcore alcoholic with organized crime connections and a taste for the ponies.

Is he real? Is he a hoax? Deceptology says “hoax,” of course. The New York Times is slightly less convinced, but still comes down on the side of hoax. I don’t really care. But the achievement of filmmaker Noel Lawrence is that he got IMDB to list Peep Show as a 1965 release — rather than the clip show it is.

The other cues that J.X. Williams is a hoax? None of the cat’s other movies have IMDB entries or Wikipedia pages, in this age of being able to find information about anything. There’s no  information whatsoever about them anywhere on the web except as put out by the J.X. Williams Archive and various other J.X. Williams-related sources. Williams nonetheless looks to the casual eye to possibly be (maybe) something approaching (maybe) real. And (maybe) alive. Except he’s not.

But if he was alive, or real, then it only makes sense that, just like the former-nun street hooker who sets out to avenge the mob murder of her beloved pimp, J.X. Williams would be pissed.

And he would apparently be pissed at himself, because the IMDB entry for J.X. Williams claims that Williams himself was born under the name of the director of the J.X. Williams Archive, Noel Lawrence, which is who Williams is pissed at.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia page, which drips with artful pomposity, is obviously written by someone in on the joke — and who’s clever enough to cite only print sources, none of which are links. The page for J.X. Williams is also tagged “Collective Pseudonyms.”

Like I care? I don’t. I just don’t have a god damned thing better to do with my time then track down mob-related J.T. DiCarlo hallucinations. With this hallucination, however, as far as I can tell, no one’s trying to get laid or even get rich. It’s all just freakin’ weirdness, which seems like it would meet with approval from the master of deception himself, Orson Welles, whose brilliant and bizarre F is for Fake is a classic example of a movie that’s not a movie about a person who’s not a person…or is he?

In the case of J.X. Williams, this weeks’ fandango stems from a screening of Williams’s films at the Slamdance Film Festival on Wednesday, curated by Noel Lawrence (who appears to be Williams). A post on therealjxwilliams.blogspot.com (sooooooooooooooooo convincing) goes like this:

For those who follow my work, you may be familiar with an unsavory “curator” by the name of Noel Lawrence. He edited a book about me in cahoots with an obscure  French rock critic and has often screened “Peep Show” and other movies at museums and cinematheques in Europe.
Until now, I have suffered this fellow. He was a pest but a persistent one so I occasionally indulged him. I gave him a few crumbs for his book and lent him some very valuable film prints from my private collection. However, Mr. Lawrence has repaid my generosity with calumny and betrayal!

Noel recently asked my permission to screen my films “at a festival in Utah” in January. Naturally, I was very excited to be a part of Robert Redford’s powwow in Park City. Strangely, Noel seemed evasive when I asked about breaking bread with the great thespian. Now I have learned that Mr. Lawrence will be showcasing my work at a doppelganger festival that bears no connection to Slundance but happens at the very same time.

Even so, I only requested that my hosts provide me with the standard perks of a visiting auteur such as a five-figure appearance fee and a limousine from the Salt Lake City airport. In fact, I even waived the usual “hookers and champagne” clause from my contract. Noel avoided my calls for some time. When my personal assistant finally reached him, he informed me that this “film festival” will not even get me a room at the Motel 6 for my stay.

Mr. Lawrence, you are a fraud and a cheat.  This offense shall not go unanswered.

Bear in mind I do not advocate a boycott of the screening. In fact, I urge your attendance as this may be your last chance to see these films. I will be confiscating my prints after the screening and locking them up in a secure location that Dick Cheney could only dream of. Instead of preventing this show, I propose to add a special bonus attraction to the festivities.  After Lawrence finishes presenting my films, I will come on stage and personally beat the shit out of this craven curator.

[Link.]

Okay, so…as pure guerrilla theater…well, that would make for pretty good guerrilla theater, I’ll admit, to have a man beat the shit out of himself onstage, a la Edward Norton in Fight Club.

Suspiciously, this post comes to my attention only through an email from Lawrence, where he says in too-polished prose that smacks of in-joke:

I assure you that this matter is just a tempest in a teapot and I am in no actual physical danger. Actually, I find the situation rather amusing.

Most importantly, the screening will happen just as planned and scheduled.

Thank you for your notes and calls of concern though. Rest assured J.X. is just blowing off some steam.

[Link.]

I get even more suspicious given the too-cute wording of the caveat at the J.X. Williams Archive (run by “Lawrence”)which provides a link to the blog:

It had come to our attention several months ago that someone identifying himself as J.X. Williams was posting messages on an Internet blog. Other writings attributed to Mr. Williams were posted on the Wikileaks website but taken down upon request of the Archive.

Upon further research, we can now affirm this blog is indeed authentic.

[Link.]

Nice. This shit is out of Sun Tsu, bubba.

Or am I just old and cranky? Could my suspicion about this enterprise stem from just an error of user-entered data in IMDB and my own bad attitude?

Right. I’ve heard that one before. I’m as smart as Fredo Corleone — can’t fool me. By the way, in “his” “post” on his “blog,” Williams cites a “book” that is in French, which I understand is a “language” spoken by “people” who “live” in some “country” supposedly called “France.” So is the linked page for the French critic who supposedly co-wrote it with “Lawrence.”

Are any of these people real? Is France real? Is this one of those situations where all your friends decide just to fuck with you they’re going to tell you, “Oh, you’ve never heard of Boner Patrol? Oh, they’re the cooooooooolest baaaaaaaaaaaand, man. You’re totally uncool for not having heard of them.”

‘Cause that’s how it feels. J.X. Williams is Boner Patrol.

But wait! Here’s supporting quotes about Williams from the “press,” courtesy of the screening’s description: Wednesday:

“A spiritual vortex of sub rosa Americana.” – Paul Cullum, The New York Times

“Underground movies cannot dig much deeper than those of J.X. Williams.” – Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal

“A musician friend once observed that the most intriguing artists don’t just create individual pieces; they’re iconic figures who project a philosophy or personality, a life force that becomes a conceptual umbrella covering everything they make. J.X. Williams, a cult filmmaker, conspiracy theorist, enemy of the Mafia and the FBI, and all-around outlaw visionary, is that sort of figure.” – Matt Zoller Seitz, Salon.com

…okeedokee. How can you argue with NY times articles that use Latin phrases, or guys from Salon calling someone an “outlaw visionary”? You know when Salon says (or maybe didn’t say) someone’s an outlaw visionary, it’s time to break out your ultra-trendy silkscreen rig and make some L.A. Death Trip t-shirts to wear to to the poetry slam so you can roll your eyes disgustedly and say “Oh, you’ve never heard of him?” when someone less cool than you asks what the fuck kind of asshattery that is on your t-shirt. Of course, if you made the guy up to begin with, that makes you even surer to be in on the in joke, while everyone is is not.

Anyway, here’s the short version of who the fuck this joker is supposed to be. It’s paraphrased from the Wikipedia article and a few other sources, including my own vast knowledge of who the fuck Johnny Rosselli is:

Probably best known for two of his later exploitation movies, 1975′s L.A. Death Trip and 1978′s You Axed For It!, filmmaker J.X. Williams’s past includes, according to his Wikipedia article, includes being blacklisted from his job in the Writers’ Division of RKA Studios when he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the heady days of 1947.

Williams supposedly thereafter got involved with mobsters like Johnny Rosselli, the Chicago mobster who for a time ran Las Vegas for the Outfit. Rosselli put Williams “in charge of directing and distributing mob-funded nudie and pornographic films,” most of which have been lost. During this period, he is said to have claimed to continue working as a ghostwriter, writing (supposedly by his claim alone) some 72 produced films he was never credited for.

Williams started directing on the exploitation circuit in with 1965′s Peep Show, about a mob conspiracy to addict Frank Sinatra to heroin. His subsequent exploitation films included I, Jezebel (1966), E.S.P. Orgy (1967), Mondo Vietnam (1968), The Phantom of the Cinema (1969), and 1970′s The Virgin Sacrifice, said to be “a three-hour long Satanic horror epic.” Then came kaboom! (1973), L.A. Death Trip (1975), and You Axed For It! (1978). (You Axed For It! is also the title of a 1985 Mentors album.)

He also reportedly kept directing porn movies during this time, including the one a Wikipedia contributor claims is “Considered one of his best.” Yes, it’s true. You remember 1979′s tearjerker other than Kramer vs. Kramer? That’s one of his. I’m referring, of course, to Nunf*cker.

And as I was saying, if you’re at the Slamdance Festival in Park City, Utah, you can supposedly hit the presentation by J.X. Williams Archive curator Noel Lawrence. Does that lend credence to the idea that Peep Show is the only real movie on the Williams resume? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? Somebody does, and somebody does, but I’m no less in the dark the deeper I dig:

But the description at the Slamdance site goes a little something like this:

In this film program and live presentation, the J.X. Williams Archive opens it vault to screen a collection of rare cinematic artifacts from its holdings. Many of these fragments come from feature films that vanished decades ago. Others offer a sneak preview of works currently undergoing restoration. Alongside these rarities, we also will screen J.X. Williams’ underground classic “Peep Show” (1965).

[Link.]

The page also has a helpful bio of Williams, much more concise than mine:

J. X. Williams was a legendary bottom-of-the-barrel director in the fifties and sixties, pushed even lower by his Commie leanings. In the early sixties, he fell in with the Chicago mob, helming a number of shakedown films used to extort dough from debauched politicos and celebs. After a legal settlement in 1981 with several major film studios over copyright disputes, Mr. Williams moved to Zurich, Switzerland and retired from filmmaking. He is infamous for his reclusiveness and distaste for the public eye.

[Link.]

It all sounds just a little too good, but then, many things do — and very occasionally, when the stars align just right, they turn out to be unbelievably real.

Is any of this real? Was there ever even a film called L.A. Death Trip, or has everyone from IMDB to some French people and some guy I’ve never heard plus AN ANONYMOUS BLOGSPOT BLOG conspired to mislead me as to the true nature of the underground exploitation grindcore renaissance of the 1970s?

Who knows? Who cares? Why bother?

Screencap of BIPRODUCT, a multimedia installation by Khalil Rabah.

Wow, Qatar has been making headlines lately. The Arabian-peninsula nation committed the coup of snatching the 2022 World Cup from the hands of other likely aspirants, assuring that players and soccer hooligans alike will have to cope with the region’s 120 degree heat.

Now, according to an article in Gulf-Times.com, Mathaf: The Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar is hosting its first multimedia art exhibition, a little thing called “Told/Untold/Retold,” which opened December 30. Qatar Museums Authority’s new exhibition hall at the Museum of Islamic Art. In fact, if you visit Mathaf’s website, you’ll find a slideshow of some absolutely incredible images, including the unbelievable image at right.

According to the website, this piece by Khalil Rabah is a multimedia installation. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what’s meant by that term, in this case…it boggles my mind. This isn’t Dubai, so I assume that Khalil Rabah didn’t actually build an aircraft carrier with plants growing on it, or obtain a carrier and plant stuff on it. But who knows…?

Incidentally, you absolutely must check out this image, from Jeffar Khaldi. There are other offerings by Khalil Rabah, Youssef Nabil, Khaled Takreti, mounir fatmi, Jeffar Khaldi, and more, for a total of 23 artists represented. But of course, the part of the show that generated headlines, and probably the only part that will lodge in the brainpans of art lovers in the west, is the dude with the camera implanted in his head.

In case you missed the media orgy in November and December over this wacky Iraqi, that guy with the head-camera he’s Iraq-born Wafaa Bilal, an artist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The implantation of a camera in Bilal’s skull was sponsored by Mathaf for the Told/Untold/Retold show. It’s part of an art experiment in which the two-inch-diameter camera in Bilal’s head takes a photo once a minute for a year, wherever Bilal goes and whatever he’s doing.

The photos are posted to the website 3rdi.me, but since Bilal is back in New York (after a trip to the middle east in December), he must be asleep now — at press time, it’s jet black.

Bilal’s project was covered pretty extensively in the Western press a month or two ago, including articles in the Daily Mail, HuffPo, Popular Science, the BBC World Service, CNN, blah blah blah. Gulf-Times quotes Bilal extensively from the BBC World Service interview about the bizarre implications of this project, including the fact, for instance, that he “hopes to upgrade his camera to a waterproof one,” so he can take a shower without a shower cap, and that his “private moments” with his girlfriend will become public moments.

I’m going to be honest with you: I get the heebie jeebies even thinking about art like Bilal’s head-camera, not because I’m squeamish about someone having a camera in their head, but because it reeks of gimmicky, pointless tech obsession. Bilal, who lost a brother to a checkpoint bomb, surely has plenty to say about surveillance and its related traumas.

And conceptual art as a category, I don’t object to — in fact, sometimes I love it. Otherwise, how could I get so excited about this incredible installation by Buthayna Ali. I occasionally wake up from nightmares alternately screaming or giggling over the installation I once saw at the San Francisco MOMA with the thousand-and-one French poodles barking at the baby. (I’ve never found it again…it may never have existed. Never have existed. Never have existed…)

But I will admit that I’ve always been deeply suspicious of “high-concept” conceptual art like the Bilal camera; I always feel like it’s remarkably free of content, relying on form to give it meaning. At any given poetry reading at the underground art gallery, I’m always the guy in the corner trying to stifle my laughter as a “performance artist” slaps meat on their head and screams “I am a butterfly! BUTTERFLY!! LOVE ME!!!”

Go ahead! Point me at a canvas of International Klein Blue, and say in your rapture-drunk voice: “Isn’t it glorious?” I’ll try not to punch you in the face. I’ll try.

Clearly, Bilal’s experiment is a whole other field of conceptual art, but as compelling as I find it, every fiber in my body screams “Gimmick.” That’s why I, personally, got a groovier vibe when I checked out Bilal’s competition for eyeballs within the Told/Untold/Retold show. In some ways its fascinatingly credulous art, which makes it kinda refreshing to me. There are other ways in which it strikes me as less credulous than American contemporary art, which has gotten pretty credulous in recent years. Whether it’s drunk American Kool-Aid or failed to drink it, I’m never quite sure.

The good news is that MATHAF has a Facebook Page, a Twitter account, and of course a blog. It’s having a photo competition (deadline, January 6!), so be sure to upload all those snaps you took when visiting the museum. If you’re a virgin to contemporary Arab art, as I am, you may be as pleased as I was to run across the “feisty Beiruti grandmother” showcased in the film Grandma, A Thousand Times, which the museum recently screened (don’t miss the upcoming UAE premier!).

I’m as sad as you are, however, that I missed the free bracelets given away last Thursday, as announced on the Twitter account:

From MATHAR's Twitpic account.

With our powers combined! We join to form Captain! Mathaf! @MathafModern bracelets for our first visitors. Come get yours this Thursday at 3PM! #Qatar

It sounds like they’re having a heck of a party over there in Qatar, that’s for dang sure.