Hands and Masks

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touchstarved

blood really does look black in the moonlight

untitled

2006

Zhou Wendou

What I love about people who claim that “Fountain” isn’t art is that they’re never the kind of people who are actually into art so they’ll just start whining about a urinal and you can come back with, like, 30 pieces that have been made as a reaction to “Fountain,” everything from Brian Eno recontextualizing it by pissing in it to Zhou Wendou conceptually unmaking it and remaking it as something that is more unquestionably art and these “BUT MODERN ART DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING” jerk are just over there feeling wanky don’t have any idea about any of it. They’re trying to yell about a hundred-year-old statement, the opening thesis of a discussion about art, and they haven’t bothered to look at the last hundred years of art nerds arguing and debating and doing fucking art about it.

“Fountain” is genuinely one of my favorite pieces of art because of how much more art it has provoked and how compelling the conversations about its status as art can be (if Duchamp’s goal was to make people question what art is does that mean that all the reactions and remixes and arguments about the original piece are actually an extension of Duchamp’s work? Is this a communal art project we’ve all been participating in for a hundred years and can you be a part of it too? I would say extremely fuck yes.)

@spycrabsunited said:

Brian Eno didn’t piss into Zhou Wendou’s 2006 Untitled piece (which is the glued-together broken urinal); he emptied a vial of urine into a replica of Duchamp’s 1917 piece “Fountain,” which was a mass-produced urinal laid on its side and signed “R. Mutt.”

Duchamp had a series of what he called “readymades” - mass-produced objects that he presented as art - and “Fountain” is the most famous of these readymade sculptures.

Plenty of people will look at a urinal in an art show and go “this isn’t art!” but in the early Dada movement nobody had thought to question whether a mass-manufactured urinal might be art. It’s a man-made object. What separates industrial craft from individual art? Is it the presentation? The context? The original intended purpose? Again, in 1917 this was a question that not a lot of people had asked before so in very general terms Duchamp put a pissoir on a pedestal and said “This is Art; Prove me Wrong.”

And then 102 years of arguing about art happened.

In 1993 Brian Eno (ambient musician and all-around weird guy) went to an exhibit that included “Fountain” and poured some urine into it. Several other people had done the same thing over the years, which is why Eno couldn’t piss directly in it and had to carry around a jar of his own waste in order to make a point.

So Eno’s point was “you’re glorifying this one particular bit of ceramic and it’s against the spirit of the original piece, this needs to be a pisspot again” and other people have peed in it to make the point that it has a broad context - it is both high art and a low urinal.

These are people who were publicly performing an action in order to make a statement about art - these were people doing performance art.

SO.

Back to 2006.

The Zhou Wendou piece takes a readymade urinal, breaks it down to ceramic, and then remakes it into a vase. It’s being very playful - conceptually remaking Duchamp’s piece into a piece of intentional art again instead of found art is clever and funny, especially when the intentional art it makes mimics something else that could easily be mass produced - it reminds me of Ai Weiwei’s 1995 work “Breaking a Han Dynasty Urn,” which also references Duchamp (it was part of Weiwei’s series about repurposing “cultural readymades”) and that’s likely intentional; I’d be surprised if Wendou wasn’t commenting on this:

“It’s powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object.” - Ai Weiwei

So that loops back around to the original piece in 1917.

Is putting a signature on a urinal art?

Is pissing in a piece of conceptual art performance art?

Is breaking an old piece of art art?

Is breaking a urinal and shaping it into a vase art?

And the reason I think all of these questions are so cool is because they boil down to this:

Is making people question the definition of art in itself art?

And I say yes.

obsessed w this scene where they’re like ‘what could it mean what could it all mean’ cutting to hannibal in his little apron making his funny little cannibal meal

Hannibal “Quantifiably Bitchy” Lecter

I had this inktober idea of doing kind of a styles challenge, trying to replicate the styles of artists that I like (not necessarily with Hannibal, but that happened too). Which artists did I imitate here?

…they’re Nakamura Asumiko and Junji Ito, of course.

au where anakin has been the Kenobis’ pool boy every summer since he was in high school and the summer before his final year of college, he starts work as normal but the Kenobis have a very messy divorce in July which means he hears a lot of it while he’s working on the pool. It also means he knows when Satine leaves and he knows when it’s for good. He comes into the house to tell Obi-Wan that he’s leaving for the night if he doesn’t need anything else from him (he has to say something) and obi-wan is drinking tersely but the unlit fireplace, and he’s says something like “what do I do with all the angry words I never told her?”

and anakin, who has had a summer crush on his hot rich older boss for years now is like “well if she left any old clothes, we can dress me up, you can pretend I’m her and tell me them!”

(a normal thing to suggest)

and obi-wan, who has always let his eyes linger on Anakin’s form longer than he probably should considering his marriage, is like “don’t be ridiculous. If you want pretty things, I’ll get you your own.”

(a normal thing to respond with)

Lepidoptera

an little PWP where will and hannibal are lesbians and fuck at a party ✌

also hello i’m posting a fic after an accidental >2 year hiatus how’s everyone doing

read below or on ao3!

“Thanks for letting me get changed here,” Wil said, clutching at the strap of her bag. “I’ll try to stay out of the way.” The party wasn’t due to start for a few more hours, but preparations were already in full swing downstairs and the foyer was buzzing with the activity of the hired staff. As she jerked quickly out of the way of a trolley full of strange-looking hors d'oeuvres, Wil again regretted her choice to come straight over from work.

“I promise you won’t be in the way, Wil. The guest room is yours for the night. Let me take your things,” Annabel said, holding out an expectant hand.

“Oh. I– I don’t need to stay after. I’ve got my car. I can drive.”

“Late at night, on these icy roads, after a party? I don’t think so.” Wil would’ve bristled at Annabel’s tone of voice, were it coming from anyone else. Imperious and presumptuous. “You already mentioned your neighbour is looking in on the dogs this evening. They’ll manage without you until tomorrow.”

“Well. I don’t have any overnight stuff with me.”

Annabel sighed, gently enough so as not to be impolite, but loud enough to make sure Wil knew that self-denial was not permitted in this house. “I have spares of anything you might need. Please, Wil. If you’re looking for permission to have fun, consider it granted.” Annabel wiggled her still-outstretched fingers, and Wil finally handed over the beat-up rucksack. Annabel smiled, quietly triumphant, and turned toward the stairs. “Just up here. Follow me.”

Wil fell into step behind Annabel, trailing her up the stairs as the busy sounds of the house faded into nothing.

Keep reading

real event that occured that i cant stop thinking about

a flustered will attempts to read while hannibal rubs his feet. (does the book kinda look upside down to y’all? haha.)

Gandalf throwing his staff at gollum is what really makes this

Thank you for commenting because I was going to scroll past this. 

— Nicholas Rombes, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (via bobschofield)

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

(Aaron Freeman, “Planning Ahead Can Make A Difference In The End”)

I’m just amazed that they managed to find someone who knew none of this

This is the only person who is experiencing Star Wars correctly

Complications of the Flesh - Nine Inch Nails [Danny Lohner] - We’re In This Together