We have loved Andy Goldsworthy’s work since we first saw images of his sculptures in school in the 80’s. But because so few of his works are permanent, we had only seen images – until yesterday. Imagine our delight when we learned that he had made one of his latest works in our own backyard in the Presidio. “Spire” has all the hallmarks of a great Goldsworthy sculpture, intrinsic to the land, made of the land . Go and see it if you have a chance. And if you don’t have a chance, familiarize yourself with Goldsworthy, an artist with an amazing vision.
http://www.presidio.gov/experiences/spire.htm

There have been a number of complaints in the cybersphere about it, but I am rather taken with Google’s new fade-in home-page. I think it is an interesting strategy to focus the user’s initial experience back to the basic visual elements of the Google brand, allowing the functional fringe elements to literally fade-in after the first visual impact.

I had not thought of it since Art 101 eons ago, but I was reminded of “The Twittering Machine” by a NYT article on the the Bauhaus exhibit. Crank the machine up, and those ethereal, mechanical birds start to sing their hearts out against a vast, infinite backdrop beyond measure. Klee reveals our vulnerability in small-scale images poised at the brink. Somewhere between nature and the mechanical, between the comic and the tragic, his birds “twitter” with a music that expresses how frail and vulnerable existence is. Or in today’s world, how ephemeral communication is. Perhaps that is the key to why Twittering has become so popular. A way to assert our selfhood in the face of infinity.

An excellent interview with fashion designer/film maker Tom Ford on Fresh Air the other night. What began as a discussion of his new film “A Single Man” evolved into musings on the nature of branding in this modern, jaded world and the role of feminine fashion as a reflection of the zeitgeist. Kudos to a very articulate Ford who gets points for causing the usually unflappable Terri Gross to stutter as she tries to quantify the sexual energy inherent is Ford’s advertisements for Gucci and Yves St. Laurent. Of particular interest are Ford’s points about the reflexive, objectifying nature of an unthinking brand.
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=12-14-2009