MISCmedia for 10/6/99
Art Trouble

YESTERDAY, we ended a piece on the decline and fall of the thrift-store lifestyle with a couple of links to thrift-store art on the Web.

Those links, natch, lead to other links, and those links lead to other links. Enough for a whole 'nother day's episode.

So herewith, some fun eye-openin' viz-art sites for 'ya.

• Behold the spectacle that is BadArt.com; not to be confused with the completely-separate Museum of Bad Art or the also-completely-separate Ohio Bad Art Guild....

• Now you can own your very own portrait of onetime child star Mason Reese (found by Memepool....)

• Gotta love a site containing such after-the-fact painting titles as "Druid ghostbusters versus the checkerboard spirits"....

• I dunno: I kinda like King David's chest tattoos....

• From Arizona, where they take religious iconography semiseriously, it's "The Jesus of the Week"....

• Interesting Ideas contains far more respectful discussions of "outsider" art, plus an appreciation for Ernie Bushmiller's deceptively simple, yet ultimately highly formalistic, comic strip Nancy....

• The work of Seattlite Anne Grgich is sometimes billed or exhibited as "naive art," even though beaucoup technique and craft goes into it....

• The Museum of Ephemeral Cultural Artifacts believes pinball back-glass designs should be at least as revered as grafitti murals....

• Supposed sexual references in early video games (found by Cruel Site of the Day)....

• One look at a few installments of the Lurid Paperback Cover of the Week, and you won't give a darn about the books' contents....

• The quantification of good painting gone horribly extreme....

• You really do need all 50 state-outline refrigerator magnets (found by Whim & Vinegar)....

• There's a whole new color out there if you believe those wacky-wacky Negativland folks (and you shouldn't) (also found by Whim & Vinegar)....

• "A lot of companies seek out tacky photos and publish them as postcards... but they can't touch the real thing...."

• Even in rowdy Australia, "hipster" cocktail art is a smash....

• Doodles & Scraps: I don't understand it, but I like it....

• There were many classic pinup illustrators, but few with as singularly odd fetishes as Art Frahm....

• It's gorgeous nighttime photography. It's beautifully decayed former drive-ins, gas stations, cars, homes, even airplanes. It's "Lost America: The Abandoned Roadside West...."

• The end of the baseball season means the end of Tiger Stadium, another chapter in The Ruins of Detroit....

• A cranky, reactionary U.K. art critic nevertheless has some salient points about the "peculiar mixture of avant-garde pretense and ferocious commercialization" running today's post-Warhol, post-Kostabi U.S. art world....

• An exhibition, originally financed by a big U.K. ad agency, that exemplifies most of the above critic's complaints about establishment "anti-establishment" art--but at least it's got David Bowie narrating the taped audio tour! (And here's an essay claiming the show's artists no longer represent "rebellion" but instead something "now entirely embedded in mainstream attitudes")....

• I dare you to attempt to read even three of these 'Anti-Art' essays from start to end....

• Memories of meals past....

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A-Rod's 40-40 Crunch, exploiting Mariners baseball star Alex Rodrieguez, is one of a whole line of regional sports-star cereals being put out by NYC-based Famous Fixins, "Producer of Celebrity Food Products." It's meant for box collectors, but the frosted flakes inside the box are quite good in their own right. They're thicker and coarser than the Kellogg's variety, and somewhat less sweet. (Now, if I could only get the company to put out "Frosted MISCberry Crunch" with my own picture on the box....)

IN OTHER NEWS: Buried at the end of this sports brief is potential great news--the just-maybe return of everybody's favorite basketball benchwarmer, the immortal Steve Scheffler!

TOMORROW: How to make a book called Faster even faster: Just read the review.

ELSEWHERE:

• What happens when Usenet discussion groups descend into madness (found by Camworld)....
• "Politics, by definition, is division" (found by Metascene)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Stick a fork in the thrift-store lifestyle; it's done.
• Diner food's back; but was it ever really gone?
• Celebrating one year exclusively online.
• Online "word of mouth" may have helped The Blair Witch Project, but could it rescue The Iron Giant?
• Parts one, two, and three of our exploration into new generation gaps.
• Home satellite dishes--still worth it?
• Brief looks at a few real-estate relics.
• Newspapers try to stem circulation declines by becoming even duller.
• Who's afraid of digital movie theaters?
• The truth behind Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner."
• Fun words about music from all over.
• The subtle beauty that is Amtrak Cascades; the first and second parts of our Vancouver journey.
• The lost seductive powers of architecture.
• Some of the supposed worst writers taught to teens; and a few examples of great writing they could be taught instead.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Longer articles and essays
• The origin and future of MISCmedia