What's my conspiracy?

[Simon of the Playa]

76E0BCDA-C0CB-4576-8A6F-6852804E7CDB.jpeg

[Savannah]

[some seeing eye]

Jan. 6 rioters exploited little-known Capitol weak spots: A handful of unreinforced windows

Four major access points that Jan. 6 rioters used to break into and overtake the U.S. Capitol had something unusual in common: They were among a dozen or so ground-floor windows and glass-paned doors that had not been recently reinforced.

The majority of the Capitol’s 658 single-pane windows were quietly upgraded during a 2017-19 renovation of the historic building. The original wooden frames and glass were covered with a second metal frame containing bomb-resistant glass.

But planners skipped about a dozen ground-floor windows, including some located in doors, because they were deemed to be low risk in the event of implosion, largely due to their discreet or shielded location, or because the building couldn’t structurally handle the load of the heavier frames.

And whether by sheer luck, real-time trial and error, or advance knowledge by rioters, several of those vulnerable windows and two glass-paned doors — protected with only a thin Kevlar film added after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — became easy entry points for hundreds of Trump supporters who overran and ransacked the building on Jan. 6.

Video shows some of the first rioters to break through the police line running past 15 reinforced windows, making a beeline for a recessed area on the Senate side of the building, where two unreinforced windows and two doors with unreinforced glass were all that stood between them and hallways leading to lawmakers inside who had not begun to evacuate.

(continues)

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/ ... ed-windows

[Simon of the Playa]

"Millions of Americans depend on the mail every day to receive their prescriptions, pay bills, receive Social Security checks, send rent payments and more," Ferguson said in the statement. "One political appointee does not get to decide the fate of the Postal Service.

https://www.rawstory.com/louis-dejoy-2655265355/

[Simon of the Playa]

EDD48628-1939-4DF5-A384-581759599D5E.jpeg

https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-searches- ... d=80666533

[some seeing eye]

Off the map: New Zealand tourism ad takes on 'conspiracy'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HynsTvRVLiI

[Simon of the Playa]

"I was just talking to Miss Cheney and then she [MTG] starts screaming at Liz. I can't remember exactly what she said. But they got into a back and forth about Jewish space lasers," Rep. Jamie Raskin told New York Daily News.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mtg-qua ... rs-2021-10

[Simon of the Playa]

5C4A1E3E-599C-4B53-B8F6-F2C2C34867BE.jpeg

[lucky420]

Wasn’t it ^^ also commissioned by some rich guy? I don’t know if that’s a thing that matters or not

[Simon of the Playa]

it was made in a factory in china.

i guess you can call that a "commission"...

my problem with the piece is the blatant theft of the idea / image etc.

it's one thing to boost a concept, it's another to steal the minutae outright and claim it is original.

1AE25BA4-8517-402D-809C-D11B6D112150.jpeg

gosh golly, even when a DJ makes a "remix" they generally at least acknowledge the Artist who made the song to begin with...

[some seeing eye]

That sucks. You are a great digital artist.

On another topic

Investigative journalists Proof Twitter thread
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 9769570308
Proof article
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/maj ... -trump-had
WaPo below
https://t.co/UdcGIssCF4?amp=1 via Twitter link reducer
Trump Advisers Enlisted Ex-Army Psy-Ops Specialist in Bid to Overturn Election
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-tr ... g-election

Investigations
Ahead of Jan. 6, Willard hotel in downtown D.C. was a Trump team ‘command center’ for effort to deny Biden the presidency

A team of advisers and lawyers worked at the Willard hotel in Washington seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate President Donald Trump for a second term. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
By Jacqueline Alemany, Emma Brown, Tom Hamburger and Jon Swaine
Yesterday at 5:51 p.m. EDT


They called it the “command center,” a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants were working day and night with one goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2020 election.

The Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and the ensuing attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob would draw the world’s attention to the quest to physically block Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s victory. But the activities at the Willard that week add to an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term.

They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

They sought to make the case to Pence and ramp up pressure on him to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within his powers, three people familiar with the operation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Their activities included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.

The effort underscores the extent to which Trump and a handful of true believers were working until the last possible moment to subvert the will of the voters, seeking to pressure Pence to delay or even block certification of the election, leveraging any possible constitutional loophole to test the boundaries of American democracy.
“I firmly believed then, as I believe now, that the vice president — as president of the Senate — had the constitutional power to send the issue back to the states for 10 days to investigate the widespread fraud and report back well in advance of Inauguration Day, January 20th,” one of those present, senior campaign aide and former White House special assistant Boris Epshteyn, told The Washington Post. “Our efforts were focused on conveying that message.”

Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn whispers to Rudolph W. Giuliani during a news conference about the election results at RNC headquarters in Washington on Nov. 19, 2020. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
In seeking to compel testimony from Bannon, the congressional panel investigating Jan. 6 this week cited his reported presence at the “ ‘war room’ organized at the Willard.” The House voted Thursday to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with the committee’s subpoena.

The committee has also requested documents and communications related to Eastman’s legal advice and analysis.
Eastman told The Post on Wednesday that he has not yet been contacted by the House select committee investigating the insurrection. Asked about his involvement in the Trump team’s operation at the Willard, Eastman said: “To the extent I was there, those were attorney discussions. You don’t get any comment from me on those.”
In May, Eastman indicated that he was at the hotel with Giuliani on the morning of Jan. 6. “We had a war room at the Willard . . . kind of coordinating all of the communications,” he told talk show host Peter Boyles, comments first reported in the newsletter Proof.

Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, did not respond to requests for comment.
Also present was One America News reporter Christina Bobb, a lawyer by training who was volunteering for the campaign at the time, according to people familiar with the operation. Bobb declined to comment.
Kerik said his firm billed the Trump campaign more than $55,000 for rooms for the legal team. The former police commissioner, who was helping to head up efforts to collect and investigate allegations of election fraud, was later reimbursed, records show.

The three people familiar with the operation described intense work in the days and hours leading up to and even extending beyond 1 p.m. on Jan 6, when Congress convened for the counting of electoral votes.
In those first days in January, from the command center, Trump allies were calling members of Republican-dominated legislatures in swing states that Eastman had spotlighted in his memos, including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, encouraging them to convene special sessions to investigate fraud and to reassign electoral college votes from Biden to Trump, two of the people familiar with the operation said.

On Jan. 2, Trump, Giuliani and Eastman spoke to 300 state legislators via a conference call meant to arm them with purported evidence of fraud and galvanize them to take action to “decertify” their election results. “You are the real power,” Trump told the state lawmakers, according to a Washington Examiner report. “You’re the ones that are going to make the decision.”

A participant on the call, Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom (R), recalled listening as Trump, Giuliani, Eastman and others described the power state legislators have over the certification of electors. “I didn’t need any convincing about our plenary powers,” McBroom told The Post. “I was listening to hear whether they had any evidence to substantiate claims” of significant voter fraud that could change the results in Michigan. The callers did not provide additional information, he said, and he did not support a delay in the electoral vote count.

But others appear to have been persuaded. Three days after the call, dozens of lawmakers from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin wrote to Pence. They asked that he delay certification of Biden’s victory for 10 days to allow “our respective bodies to meet, investigate, and as a body vote on certification or decertification of the election.”

Also on Jan. 2, Eastman, Giuliani and Epshteyn appeared on Bannon’s podcast to make the case directly to Bannon’s pro-Trump listeners. They discussed what Bannon called that day’s “all-hands meeting with state . . . legislators that the Trump campaign and also others are putting on.” The comments were first highlighted by Proof.
They argued that state lawmakers were legally bound to reexamine their election results. “It’s the duty of these legislatures to fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected,” Eastman said. He contended that Congress could itself decide on Jan. 6 to select Trump electors in contested states, but that “it would certainly be helped immensely if the legislatures in the states looked at what happened in their own states and weigh in.”

Eastman was not the first or the only person in Trump’s sphere to argue that Pence was empowered to block or delay certification of Biden’s victory. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn — and Trump himself — suggested as much on Dec. 23, retweeting a post about the possibility of invoking “the Pence card.”
But after other efforts failed, as Jan. 6 neared, the Eastman strategy came into bloom. Eastman, a Federalist Society member, law professor and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had the conservative legal credentials to burnish the argument.

Eastman’s first memo, only two pages long, described a six-point plan by which Pence could effectively commandeer the electoral counting process and enable Trump to win. The memo was first revealed last month in the book “Peril,” by Washington Post writers Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

Eastman has said it was a “preliminary draft” of a more complete and nuanced memo that outlined multiple possible outcomes following the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. The ideas in the memos were the basis for a discussion of options Pence had with Eastman and Trump in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, he has said.

Eastman has more recently distanced himself from the memos, telling the National Review on Friday that the options he outlined did not represent his advice. He said he wrote the memos at the request of “somebody in the legal team” whose name he could not recall.

In the Sacramento Bee, Eastman wrote on Oct. 7 that he advised Pence to delay counting the electoral votes to give the states time to resolve concerns about voting irregularities.

This was the strategy around which the Trump advisers in the Willard command center coalesced, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions there in the early days of January. For that scenario to upend Biden’s win, legislatures in those states would investigate alleged fraud and, if they chose, could decertify their results.
But by Jan. 5, Pence was not sold on the plan, according to “Peril.” That evening, Trump called over to Giuliani and then to Bannon, who were both at the Willard at the time, according to the book, which reported some details of the events at the Willard that day. Trump told Bannon that Pence had been “very arrogant” when the two discussed the matter earlier in the day, the book reported. The following day, Eastman spoke at the rally on the Ellipse.
“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o’clock he let the legislatures of the states look into this so that we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not!” Eastman told the crowd. “We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can’t get the answer to this question!”

Pence withstood the pressure. Around 1 p.m., as he prepared to gavel in the joint session, he announced via a letter posted to Twitter that he would count the electoral college votes as they had been cast several weeks earlier.

When the violence erupted a short time later, forcing Congress into recess, some of the most ardent Trump supporters saw an opportunity. “Congress is adjourned. Send the elector choice back to the legislatures,” Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona GOP, tweeted at 3:30 p.m., more than half an hour after insurrectionists in tactical gear made their way to the floor of the Senate.

Ward did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Epshteyn told The Post, “In line with President Trump’s position and message, the Trump legal team immediately made it clear that any and all violence is not acceptable.” At 2:30 p.m. on Jan. 6, shortly after the Capitol was breached, Epshteyn tweeted: “To all those protesting, please stay PEACEFUL and respect the LAW.”

After the violence began, Trump used his Twitter account to ask his supporters to “Stay peaceful,” but notably did not tell them to go home until 4:17 p.m., when he tweeted a video of himself addressing the Capitol rioters. “I know your pain. I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you, you’re very special.”

While the lawyers at the Willard were focused on promoting the legal strategy Eastman outlined, Kerik helped head up efforts to sift through allegations of election fraud. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations, led a team of people who provided Kerik with analyses of state data, which purported to show fraudulent voting, according to two of the people familiar with activities at the Willard.

Waldron was working closely with Russell Ramsland, a Texas Republican who had been spreading election-fraud conspiracy theories for months before the election and submitted affidavits to multiple post-election lawsuits claiming fraud, The Post has previously reported. Ramsland was present in one of the Willard rooms on the evening of Jan. 6, according to photographs posted to Instagram that circulated widely after the congressional committee’s mention of the “war room.”

Waldron and Ramsland did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Kerik said he had been working alongside Giuliani since Nov. 5, two days after the election, and that they continued until Jan. 19. “I believed until Inauguration Day that something could be done — that’s why the fight was still going on,” Kerik told The Post. “There were a lot of people who thought on the 6th that it was over, but I didn’t believe that because the evidence seemed so overwhelming to me.”

Kerik and Giuliani set up shop in Washington in early November at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, according to Kerik, and in the third week in December moved to the Willard, closer to the White House. The Willard attracted many pro-Trump figures around that time, including “Stop the Steal” provocateur Roger Stone. Stone was not part of the Giuliani team at the Willard and did not participate in the team’s efforts, according to the three people with knowledge of the matter.

On Jan. 8, Kerik billed the Trump campaign for $66,371.54 in travel expenses, including $55,295 on rooms for legal team members at the Willard from Dec. 18 to Jan. 8, according to Kerik and documents reviewed by The Post. The legal team members referenced in the documents include Kerik, Giuliani and Eastman.

Documents also show that Kerik paid for rooms for William Ligon, a Georgia state senator who had chaired two hearings in Atlanta at which Giuliani aired false claims of election fraud, and Preston Haliburton, an Atlanta attorney who had represented a Coffee County Republican leader who claimed to be a whistleblower with evidence about Dominion voting machines.

Ligon and Haliburton did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Kerik initially sought reimbursement from the Republican National Committee, but said he was told the party would not foot the bills. The bills were eventually submitted to the Trump campaign, which agreed to pay them.
Kerik told The Post he was “furious” with the RNC because it collected tens of millions of dollars in support of Trump’s legal battle, “yet didn’t spend a dime on [Giuliani’s] legal team or their expenses.”

The RNC has previously said that it did not pay the legal bills because neither Giuliani nor Kerik were hired by or represented the organization.

Eastman stayed at the Willard from Jan. 3 until after breakfast on Jan. 8, according to records showing that the hotel charged $1,407 for his lodging and meals during that time.

His arrival at the Willard came on the same day that Trump convened an Oval Office meeting to discuss replacing then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey B. Clark, a Justice Department official friendly with Eastman who proposed that the department encourage investigation of Trump’s election fraud claims in Georgia and other states. The three-hour meeting with Trump ended after Rosen, other department officials and White House counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to resign if Clark were appointed.

Clark has been subpoenaed by the House panel investigating Jan. 6 and is required to appear for questioning at the end of next week. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Although Clark’s proposal was rebuffed, those working in the Willard command center continued to push the idea that Pence could intervene on Jan. 6 itself. Other legal scholars disagreed.

Two experts — former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig and former Justice Department official John Yoo, both known as stalwart conservatives — advised Pence’s staff that there was no basis for the vice president to intervene in the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6. “I advised that there was no factual basis for Mike Pence to intervene and overturn the results of the election,” said Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. “There are certain limited situations where I thought the Vice President does have a role, for example in the event that a state sends two different electoral results. . . . But none of those were present here.”

Luttig, a former federal appellate judge well known to Trump and for whom Eastman had clerked early in his career, told Pence’s staff on Jan. 4 that the analysis Eastman offered in his first memo was “incorrect.” Luttig said subsequently that Eastman’s advice was wrong “at every turn,” including his suggestion that the vice president could delay the electoral vote count.

Dalton Bennett, Alice Crites, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: This story has been amended to include additional details regarding the events of Jan. 5 from the book “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

[Simon of the Playa]

That sucks. You are a great digital artist.

thanks, but he didn't rip off my schlock, he stole it from the interweb evidently.

my art is always for free, steal all you want...

[gaminwench]

Yeah, I've had it 'up to here' with Michael Benisty, Artist (NOT).

[lucky420]

it was made in a factory in china.

i guess you can call that a "commission"...

my problem with the piece is the blatant theft of the idea / image etc.

it's one thing to boost a concept, it's another to steal the minutae outright and claim it is original.

1AE25BA4-8517-402D-809C-D11B6D112150.jpeg



gosh golly, even when a DJ makes a "remix" they generally at least acknowledge the Artist who made the song to begin with...

Thank you for the clarification, I hadn’t really paid that much attention

[BBadger]

Definitely ripped off. I've had a hard time identifying where the original came from though. I'm not even certain Marek Okon did it, as the only reference to that artist in conjunction with this piece, that I could find, is from some desktop wallpaper posting by someone else.

[Ungtartog]

Here you go bud... and I have much more on Benisty, including his customs records for every piece that he slapped his name on and displayed at Burning Man. I have long suspected that he did not even do much of the *design* work.. and I suggest his innate skills are likely rudimentary at best. He has good taste in what he steals. I have found corollaries for many of his BM pieces, but this is the most blatant and easy to identify theft to date. It does take some sleuthing to find the piece he used and then find it's origin. Marek probably would have been stoked to have his work realized in this way... if he was asked. I very much doubt Benisty knows his name... I doubt he knows the names of the people that build his pieces for him either.
[attachment=0]marek okon tattoo.JPG[/attachment]

[Simon of the Playa]

obvious blatant rip off is obvious...

[some seeing eye]

One of the jokes is art is "if you can't make it good, make it red, if you can't make it red, make it big, and if you can't make it big, export it to another country, then import it back."

Benisty's work seems like a mix of the 2014 Embrace by the Pier Group, and Marco Cochrane's on the playa work since 2010.

Sad. I hope he is not getting art grants. This could also be considered a weakness in the BORG anti-curation philosophy.

In art school there is a lot of study of art history because it is considered rude and a failure of creativity to steal other's work. So far he has has appeared to have stolen from Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, the Buddha, Pier Group, and Cochrane. He sells tabletop versions of his playa works.

Benisty is a self--taught pop artist who is using the Gerlach regional to promote his career:

https://peoplepill.com/people/michael-benisty

"Michael Benisty (born 20 May 1977) is a Belgian self-taught multimedia artist who creates digital and sculptural art that portrays the world's current state of affairs, spirituality, power, and the powerless. He is well known for his large sculptures displayed in different famous projects such as Art Basel, Art with Me, and Burning Man (2017 & 2018). Benisty's forte is predominantly metal sculptural work.

CAREER
Michael Benisty was born in Antwerp, Belgium. His journey of self-taught artistry began with photography. In the late 1990s, he traveled from Europe[29] to New York where he started taking an interest in sculptures.

In 2011, he collaborated with Nadja Swarovski for the 8 ft tall stainless steel sculpture called “Die to Live” featuring 345,798 golden black Swarovski crystals. The skull is 700 pounds heavy and is textured all over with the crystals. It was exhibited at the SELECT Fair and the OC Concept store in New York.

His Art Basel Miami sculpture called "Love Dogs" was inspired by artist Jeff Koons’ balloon dog sculpture and Keith Haring's Dogs.

In 2016, his famous golden Buddha sculpture was featured at the Miami Beach home of Hotelier Alan Faena.

Michael made his first sculptural artwork "Mirage" for Burning Man in 2017. It was 15 feet tall and made out of 47 layers of mirror polished stainless steel.

The following year he unveiled his largest second sculpture, "In Every Lifetime I Will Find You", presented at Burning Man 2018.

In 2019 he created several large works. He made "Agaue" for Art With Me Tulum, an intricate deity face made out of gold polished wavy stainless steel.

He also unveiled two new works during Burning Man 2019, "Sacred Grounds'' and "Broken But Together".

[Simon of the Playa]

yeah,


fuck that shit.

[gaminwench]

Except he doesn't make them. He commissions an artist in China to fabricate his 'lifted' ideas, then displays them as his own art.

[Ungtartog]

[quote="Simon of the Playa" post_id=1210968 time=1635184441 user_id=29211]
yeah,


fuck that shit.
[/quote]

In 2017 he raised 30,000 on Kickstarter to build “LOVE” … a large Cochrane style woman sitting in lotus with her hands in a heart shape over her head. He took the money and bought “mirage” instead. A much smaller piece that did not resemble what he advertised in any way. I think this happened when he found out Marco’s technique was unique to Marco… and paying someone to duplicate it is not so easy. If you look at the render of “LOVE” (the Kickstarter is still ipit is clear that whoever produced that image didn’t understand anything about how Marco builds. The nested geodesic structure is not something Marco was taught… he invented that technique.

[some seeing eye]

Tucker Carlson's new documentary suggests the Capitol riot was a false flag meant to demonize conservatives

https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker- ... ag-2021-10

[Ungtartog]

The only tragedy about 1/6 was that the White House was still standing the next morning. Most ineffective and pathetic “insurrection” ever. Clown on clown crime.

[Simon of the Playa]

05C0AACE-2139-4716-81C9-242BE476475F.jpeg

[lucky420]

No words ^^
Or to many words and I want to rant out but I won’t

[burner von braun]

Thanks for the info about Benisty, I wasn't aware of this.

[171/348]

In art school there is a lot of study of art history because it is considered rude and a failure of creativity to steal other's work.

Wendell Castle disagrees.

30ish years ago I went to a lecture at the Philadelphia Art Museum given by Wendell Castle, one of America's premier Potter/Sculptor/Educators. I took a plethora of notes that have helped me thought my Artmaking journey but there was one thing he said that really stuck with me:

"Copying other peoples Art isn't a problem. It only becomes a problem when you begin to copy yourself."

Now, of course, he wasn't talking about forgeries or making a living off of churning out a million copies of someone else's work. He's talking about the learning process. A process probably best exemplified by the Bauhaus School in the form of Freida Wildenhain. One of her teaching techniques was to throw a pot and then have her students fill a ware cart (a fairly large set of shelves on wheels) with copies. When they were done she would whack all of the ones that didn't measure up with a stick, at which point she would remind the student that the assignment was to fill the cart. This would go on all day. I doubt they ever fired or kept any of the pieces, but having gone through a similar experience in Junior High (3 months, 4+ hours a day of 3 pull cylinders cut in half, lather rinse repeat) and then having "copied" some famous pieces of pottery and sculptures for Ethan Allen, I can personally attest to the incredible amount you learn from such undertakings.

There's another one of those 'big red' type Art School sayings, "There's nothing new under the sun". Their way of saying learn as much as you can from the art history, try out multiple styles, keep the things you like, move on from the ones that don't suit you. Over time you develop your own thing out of the wide ranging foundation of skills you developed from all the different things you tried.

[gaminwench]

Oooh, lucky, I wanna read your rant. Go for it!

[some seeing eye]

In art school there is a lot of study of art history because it is considered rude and a failure of creativity to steal other's work.

Wendell Castle disagrees.

30ish years ago I went to a lecture at the Philadelphia Art Museum given by Wendell Castle, one of America's premier Potter/Sculptor/Educators. I took a plethora of notes that have helped me thought my Artmaking journey but there was one thing he said that really stuck with me:

"Copying other peoples Art isn't a problem. It only becomes a problem when you begin to copy yourself."

Now, of course, he wasn't talking about forgeries or making a living off of churning out a million copies of someone else's work. He's talking about the learning process. A process probably best exemplified by the Bauhaus School in the form of Freida Wildenhain. One of her teaching techniques was to throw a pot and then have her students fill a ware cart (a fairly large set of shelves on wheels) with copies. When they were done she would whack all of the ones that didn't measure up with a stick, at which point she would remind the student that the assignment was to fill the cart. This would go on all day. I doubt they ever fired or kept any of the pieces, but having gone through a similar experience in Junior High (3 months, 4+ hours a day of 3 pull cylinders cut in half, lather rinse repeat) and then having "copied" some famous pieces of pottery and sculptures for Ethan Allen, I can personally attest to the incredible amount you learn from such undertakings.

There's another one of those 'big red' type Art School sayings, "There's nothing new under the sun". Their way of saying learn as much as you can from the art history, try out multiple styles, keep the things you like, move on from the ones that don't suit you. Over time you develop your own thing out of the wide ranging foundation of skills you developed from all the different things you tried.

Thanks! I'm familiar with his work. He was a force moving craft towards art and increasing the sales price.

But craft is completely different from contemporary art. My definition of craft is that it is learned person to person in person. It is very material heavy and technique heavy. In craft there is a lot of "copying" design that has gone before. A lot of that happens in search of function. Contemporary art is similarly idea heavy.

Craft moves slowly and contemporary art moves fast.

There is contemporary craft and RISD has been a proponent of it.

I once heard a great talk by Gene Youngblood on contemporary art. Contemporary art is always working to expand the boundary of "art," and take over land from "not art." A perfect example is bringing "burner art" into "art." He wrote a great essay "Mass Media and the Future of Desire" http://vasulka.org/archive/Contributors ... sMedia.pdf. He started on a book about the idea but never finished it. At the time, 1977, he was proposing a utopian Internet. His thinking was very influential in Silicon Valley at the time, but the economic forces of evil won out later.

[Simon of the Playa]

i knew wendell castle, and i'm pretty sure he would have shit on benisty too.


seriously.