I lived in China for about 4.5 years, and when I turned 45 there I realized that one in every ten days of my life I’d awoken in China. I lived in small cities by Chinese standards, and there were so few other Westerners in those cities that I knew them all, and could count…
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More thoughts after days of ruminating on this topic, and various challenges to my arguments on my blog and elsewhere. Note that if you disagree with me, or have in the past, that’s perfectly fine. I’m more interested in understanding reality than I am in being right. If I were to suddenly switch my pro-free…
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[Note: I’m just calling it the “wuflu” for convenience, rather than the “Novel Coronavirus 2019”. Also made the graphic above for fun.] At this point there’s nothing I can do other than wait for the inevitable spread of the virus — if science is correct — to the city where I live. I’m too close…
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It’s no surprise that people are misinformed, dis-informed, misled, or that their priorities are skewed. We can thank the media for much of that, and our postmodern, post-truth world where subjectivity trumps truth at every turn, and narratives are more important than science. It’s also nearly impossible to get accurate information out of China, because…
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The Wuhan Coronavirus is potentially much worse than SARS. I’m fascinated by this story because I’ve lived in China for nearly five years; I live in Thailand now, and we have 8 cases of infected individuals; and I just got over a month-long bout of bronchitis so am a little sensitive about airborne communicable diseases.…
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Can you guess which one is my version? Have a look, and you can find out if you were right down below. If you don’t know already, I have a contemporary art / fine art background, and have been making digital art starting around 20 years ago. I’ve given up on the contemporary art world,…
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Suddenly I realized how ridiculous it is to expect people to care. People are too subsumed in their own lives, responsibilities, worries, and so on to be expected to even have the wherewithal to care about you or me or this or that person, or group of people. Asking people to care is like asking…
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Gotta’ love me some pollution! I’m an expat who’s lived in Asia for about 15 years, and in some of the more polluted parts. I’m also rather health conscious and trying to level up my diet and exercise regimen. I feel like I’ve got some obstacles that might be making that a bit more of…
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Lots of people hate conceptual art. It’s really quite remarkable, and possibly unfortunate. Ostensibly, artists make art to engage, entertain, and inform people, in which case hatred is an extreme response. Though it does occur to me that the kind of art that is most disliked might be the variety that tries to “challenge” the…
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Everyone is an artist, and anything and everything is art (except painters and paintings)! Words have come to mean, if not their precise opposite, something quite different from what is or was in the dictionary. Literally now means figuratively (ex., “It was literally raining cats and dogs!”). Random means all sorts of things, like cool,…
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [Here I present an argument that art must be beautiful. Note that beauty signifies being visually captivating, compelling, or interesting, and doesn’t mean it’s…
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[I use “rant” to designate posts where I just write extemporaneously, usually over a cup of coffee or two. They have an advantage of sorts, in that the flow is uninterrupted, and I can only talk about what I already know.] This is one of those things where we just look at one side of…
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If you can’t beat ’em. Ban ’em! While Facebook and Instagram ostensibly banned “far right extremists”, banning people one doesn’t agree with itself resembles a “far right extremist” tactic. Banishing the opposition grates against my more progressive sensibility. Censorship is a tool historically associated with abuse of power, silencing dissent, and squashing the underdog. The…
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One of the oldest techniques I use to invent imagery is to just make a bunch of marks and see what I see. I sometimes make a bunch of thumbnail sketches, and then choose whichever one inspires me at the moment. I made about a dozen thumbs before making my most recent piece (above right…
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I wrote this days ago, and then just sat on it, because, an opinion piece about why opinion is inherently an insufficient projection upon reality is self-cancelling. On second thought, that was the point. Reality is boundless and unfathomable, hence any opinions, beliefs, and conclusions about it are mere projections upon it, something to tether…
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[When you know what you are supposed to think, it means that you aren’t supposed to think.] I wrote a whole article about this, and then decided I don’t want to engage or react to the radical left (or right) ideologues, or poison my peace of mind with their neurosis (anymore), if I can help…
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Righteous political posturing is not synonymous with significant artistic achievement. The art world is so afraid of the political moralists that it is compelled to make any trivial political protest into front-page art news, and refuses to criticize it, even as art. Allow me to put a little perspective on this boring-ass, preachy, completely unoriginal…
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According to an article in artnetnews, the key is merely to be picked up by a big name venue early in your career. Sorry everyone else, your actual art is irrelevant, and THAT is F’ing pathetic. This is super depressing shit, and stupid. News flash: terminal myopia is not the right metaphor for visual art…
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This photo makes me angry. I haven’t seen or suspected anything could be this delusional in the art world since Jeff Koons claimed he improved upon old-master paintings by affixing a gaudy, blue gazing ball to assistant-painted copies of them. It’s not just that Schnabel had the arrogance to curate his own work next to…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. This…
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The current paradigm is Investment, which is cynically boring in terms of art appreciation, and tragically myopic. Art is reduced to objects with price-tags on them that investors gamble on, while also trying to influence the market by promoting the artists they invest in, and so on. The end result is a handful of superstar…
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Anything that opposes art is probably immoral, even or especially when it wraps itself in the cloak of morality. The least we can ask of moral crusaders is that they are fighting for the highest good, and not merely advocating for their own special interests and personal benefit in and through alienating and disenfranchising others.…
Read MoreLoud Alien Noize did a feature on my Selfies From Alternate Universes series. Click on the pic or the link to check it out, and he’s got lots of other fascinating content about art, music, film, and culture.
Seriously folks, the public reaction to this series has been somewhere between milquetoast and viscous (and stupid) attacks. But, uh, Tobe Damit at Loud Alien Noise and a few other people whose opinions matter to me really dig it. Perhaps more people will catch on over time, and I should do more of these.
Selfies from Alternate Universes ”All of these digital paintings are based on my humble visage” says Eric Wayne. I been keeping an eye on him and when I saw the first samples of the ”Selfish-Selfies” as he had already called them, I knew he was onto something. Finally someone had found a way to make […]
via Eric Wayne — Loud Alien Noize
Note: I don’t recall every using the phrase “selfish selfies”, ’cause that has a rather negative connotation. Though I might have said “self-ish” (as in self-ish portraits, because they are not exactly self-portraits) which has a very different meaning.
~ Ends
WARNING: I wrote this in the course of a day, when I was in a particularly dark mood, and not worried about hyperbolic excess. I then shelved it as too negative. later I reconsidered it, and saw it had some good, honest bits, and a few passages with rhetorical flair. Now I share it as…
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This is a style of B&W drawing I return to again and again. Not only have I done at least 10 using the same approach recently, I used to use the same technique for charcoal drawings 25 years ago. The procedure is super simple and direct, and it relies entirely on my imagination, memory, and…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after being fed through Faceapp (which can change age, gender, etc.), then altered in Photoshop, and then painted in Corel Painter. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from parallel dimensions or…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after being fed through Faceapp (which can change age, gender, etc.), then altered in Photoshop, and then painted in Corel Painter. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from parallel dimensions or…
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A small graphic from WordPress appeared a couple days ago notifying me that I’ve been blogging for 5 years. Two things come immediately to mind when faced with that fact. One is that I’ve continued to blog, and expand my site far beyond what I could have ever conceived when I started. I have 560…
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