Gondolas full of tourists. In the background the renovation works’ scaffolding of the Punta della Dogana de Mar (also known as Punta della Salute). Project: architect Tadao Ando, $$ François Pinault Foundation, Palazzo Grassi.
img: The Venice Factory – oddtag on flickr.com
txt: Creating a World Without Poverty by Muhammad Yunus
Three themes are central to this book.
The first is poverty—its causes and cure. I will show that poverty is created by economic, social, and political systems, and by false ideas—not by the laziness, ignorance, or moral failings of the poor.
The second theme is the role of women as drivers of the coming revolution. Current social arrangements especially victimize poor women. If the creativity, energy, and desire for family improvement that are latent in hundreds of millions of the world’s women can be unleashed, nothing can stand in their way.
The third theme is technology as a crucial enabler of the revolution. New ways of managing and communicating information are already changing lives the world over. Now these tools must be made available to everyone, including residents of the most remote villages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The result will be decentralization of economic andpolitical power as worldwide markets in ideas, goods, and services become accessible to all.
img: Dreaming Girls Head
txt: Art 38 Basel – Public Art Projects – on www.kopenhagen.dk
On Messeplatz in front of the Art Basel fair, visitor’s can witness nine public art projects. The nine works are each very different and show a wide range of artistic techniques, interests and fabrics. From Wim Delvoye’s amazing and monumental reconstruction of a big trailer with a truck, to Tadashi Kawamata’s Tree Hut – a wood hut runned up in one of the existing flagpoles, to Paul McCarthy’s perverse Santa with Butt Plug, Mike Nelson’s exotic old bus, Elmgreen & Dragset’s flashy, melting postcard-selling kiosk, and the delicate 11-meter-high Baton by Not Vital, to the poetic and beautiful round, polished steel mirror of the sky by Anish Kapoor, the LSD-influenced work of Thomas Zipp, and finally the 1:1 funny house build by Vedavamazzei. Enjoy the pictures….
img: crack – moufle on flickr.com
txt: Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption – Chris Jordan on www.chrisjordan.com
Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.
The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.
As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.
img: Consumism II – Marooned on flickr.com
