Barbara Kruger goes back to school - Los Angeles Times

Barbara Kruger goes back to school - Los Angeles Times

Barbara Kruger goes back to school
Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger’s giant clocks installation dominates student center at UC San Diego.

Philipp Scholz Rittermann, xx

‘ANOTHER’: Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger’s giant clocks installation dominates student center at UC San Diego.
Email Picture
'Another,' the conceptual artist's installation at UC San Diego, gives passing students something to think about with its use of quotation panels and news tickers embedded in clock faces.
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times
June 23, 2008
LA JOLLA -- As your eyes plot the final few steps down the central staircase in UC San Diego's new student center, they land on a red terrazzo text panel that reads: "Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror." Not exactly a soft landing but certainly an interesting one. Not far from that Carlos Fuentes quote is one in charcoal tones from Franz Kafka: "The meaning of life is that it stops."

Elsewhere beneath the chairs and tables of the Price Center East's airy food court, pithy comments from Virginia Woolf, Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt, Robert Frost, Confucius and others are strewn across the floor like so many scattered tickets to greater awareness.

The quotes are part of a recently completed installation by Barbara Kruger, the 17th addition to the campus' distinguished Stuart Collection. Across a 40-by-80-foot wall in the atrium, Kruger has stretched a giant photomural of two stilled clock faces. Colored rectangular panels resembling those on the floor overlay the timepieces and read like a rhythmic chant: "Another day," "Another dream," "Another place," "Another loss," "Another job," "Another love," "Another dollar," "Another game," and so on. Through each clock face runs an LED news ticker with a continuous feed of the day's headlines.

An estimated 20,000 people will pass through the building (which is open 24/7) daily to eat, meet, study, attend performances and other events.

"At a museum or gallery, people are not going to come back every day, but here they do," said Kruger, in town from L.A. to inaugurate the piece, titled "Another." "That's what I love about this site -- the accretion of meaning in pieces, which is the way so many people, especially young people, come to the world today, or how the world comes to them, through meaning in pieces."



Finding her niche

Kruger, 63, started combining text and found photographic images in her own art after years working as an art director and picture editor for several major magazines in New York. Like the Dadaists of the early 20th century, whose collage and montage aesthetic resonated with the new fragmentation of modern life, her work complicates today's fast-moving visual stream, interjecting challenges and questions to do with gender, power, consumerism and more.

"I shop therefore I am" reads one of her more famous prints. The words are hers; the images she incorporates them into come from old photo annuals, technical manuals and to her outdated sources. "Your body is a battleground" declares another. Since the late '70s, her work has appeared on billboards, bus posters, magazine and book covers, op-ed pages and internationally in museum and gallery exhibitions. Increasingly, it involves movement, in the form of text or video. She was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999-2000 and was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Her elevator installation is a permanent feature of the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA.

Kruger's credentials meant little to a UCSD bookstore employee, having lunch recently with a few co-workers in the new campus center. Glancing up at the mural, he scoffed, "It's what -- five minutes on Photoshop? It's not that impressive."

Others at the table nodded in agreement, though all felt the texts underfoot were "pretty cool." Kruger selected the 33 quotes for their ability to speak to the present, though they date from vastly different places and times. Charlotte Brontë opines on the necessity of education to eradicate prejudices, Thomas Mann likens speech to civilization itself and Voltaire warns that "Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

A microbiology student eating over his class notes took offense at one of the quotes and dismissed most of them as "trite." A recent graduate, joining a current structural engineering major in some lunchtime Bible study, pronounced the installation "depressing," noting in particular the Kafka quote. "The point of the art seems to be that life is meaningless," he said. "I don't appreciate that it's thrown in my face all the time."

With 27,000 students and thousands more employees calling the university home, reactions are bound to be diverse. One young woman, a psychology major, enthused about the installation. "It's really exciting. You don't know right away what the message is. The quotes give you a lot to think about. It's stimulating."

Some of the quotes are funny, Kruger pointed out, and "some are brutal. They're really important, especially for students, especially at this formative time, where it's supposed to be about an accumulation of meaning and not necessarily based on belief but to foster doubt and inquisitiveness and intellectual curiosity. That's probably incredibly idealistic, but as a teacher I think it's my job to suggest that."



Kruger a good fit

Kruger is on the faculty of UCLA but previously taught for five years at UCSD and is fluent with the campus environment. The 25-year-old Stuart Collection, with commissions by Alexis Smith, Michael Asher, Robert Irwin, Tim Hawkinson, William Wegman, Kiki Smith and Elizabeth Murray, among others, was a great resource while at the university, she recalls, clearly delighted that she now numbers among its artists. (The collection bears the name of its instigator and original patron, the late businessman James Stuart DeSilva.) Her work is particularly resonant with John Baldessari's text/image installation at the entrance to the Geisel Library, Jenny Holzer's granite table engraved with critical commentary in a courtyard across campus and Bruce Nauman's neon-flashing "Vices and Virtues" atop a laboratory building just a hop from the new Price Center East.

"I had a daily relationship with the Price Center when I was teaching here," she said of the original student center, adjacent to the new addition. "It's very close to the Visual Arts building. I was here every day. I would eat here, I would meet students here. What informed the idea of 'Another' was everydayness -- coming to this building every day and dealing with time and the passage of it."



Layered significance

The center bustles with the activity of students, faculty and, just weeks after opening, painters and construction workers. Its architecture by L.A.-based Mehrdad Yazdani alone conveys a sense of dynamism and motion. The vast atrium is formed by converging diagonals, rimmed with balconies that sport colorful university-produced banners exclaiming: "Eat. Shop. Play. Relax. Meet. Belong. Price Center: This is your neighborhood."

To this busy, multipurpose, multilayered space, Kruger's installation adds yet more purpose and more layers. Its frozen clocks jar with the persistent motion of the news feed; the text panels scattered like confetti interrupt the building's only neutral surface, the floor.

With all that is going on in the environment and for each book-toting, snack-munching, text-messaging, iPod-connected student, "Another" may barely register, but that's OK with Kruger.

"Some people will be more vigilant about it, but peripheral awareness is fine because of the repetition that happens. Because there is such a repeat attendance here, the peripheralness adds up in increments and becomes more of an understanding of something. I don't expect people to sit here like it's the Rothko chapel, but if you're sitting in front of this for four years, it's going to seep in."

Also, she noted, the audience rotates. "People are here for a few years and then they leave, so it becomes new again to whoever comes here."

Most things at UCSD eventually become invisible, one of the lunching bookstore employees lamented. Generation Y has a famously short attention span. That doesn't bother Kruger, though, because she does too and believes her work shows it. What she cares most deeply about amid the flux and flutter is what remains constant.

"The world is so different than when I was born, and yet there are some things that do stay the same," she said. "I try to make work about how we are to one another. It's a creation of a kind of commentary. People through time have been struggling with this. You can read a Russian novel from 150 years ago and some of it feels so alive today. That's the power of this commentary that sometimes we call art."

Viver mais sem comer menos

:: Agência FAPESP - Divulgando a cultura científica ::

Viver mais sem comer menos


13/06/2008

Por Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP– Na década de 1930, cientistas demonstraram que uma dieta com poucas calorias retardava o envelhecimento, aumentando a longevidade dos animais. Agora, pesquisadores da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) conseguiram promover em camundongos os mesmos efeitos benéficos da dieta de restrição calórica sem precisar diminuir a quantidade de alimento.

A estratégia consistiu em tratar os animais com uma droga que diminui o aproveitamento energético das mitocôndrias. Além de aumentar em cerca de 10% a longevidade, o tratamento reduziu os índices ligados à síndrome metabólica – o conjunto de fatores de risco cardiovascular que inclui diabetes, hipertensão arterial, distúrbios lipídicos e obesidade.

O estudo, coordenado por Alicia Kowaltowski, professora do Departamento de Bioquímica da USP, foi publicado no site e em breve sairá na edição impressa da revista Aging Cell.

A mitocôndria é uma organela celular que, com o uso do oxigênio da respiração, converte a energia dos alimentos em energia química, ou trifosfato de adenosina (ATP), vital às atividades celulares.

De acordo com Alicia, a estratégia utilizada se baseou no mecanismo conhecido como desacoplamento mitocondrial. “O desacoplamento consiste em diminuir a síntese de ATP mantendo a mesma quantidade de alimento”, disse à Agência FAPESP. O estudo tem apoio da FAPESP na modalidade Projeto Temático.

Segundo a cientista, para sintetizar o ATP, a mitocôndria gera um gradiente de prótons – isto é, fica mais positiva do lado de fora do que em seu interior. Esse gradiente serve como fonte de energia para a síntese de ATP.

“A droga que utilizamos, o dinitrofenol, diminui esse gradiente de prótons, deixando que alguns deles voltem para dentro da mitocôndria sem que haja síntese de ATP”, explicou.

O dinitrofenol é conhecido há muito tempo e, na década de 1930, já era utilizado como droga para o emagrecimento. Mas, apesar de eficaz, seu uso causava controvérsias, uma vez que a dose terapêutica estava muito próxima da dose tóxica.

“O que fizemos foi utilizar o dinitrofenol em uma dose muito menor para mostrar que a diminuição do aproveitamento de energia da mitocôntria é capaz de prevenir os efeitos do envelhecimento”, afirmou Alicia.

O estudo teve participação da professora Marisa Medeiros e das estudantes Camille Caldeira da Silva, Fernanda Cerqueira e Lívea Barbosa, que realizaram os experimentos.

Segundo Alicia, o grupo já havia realizado um estudo semelhante, em 2004, em um modelo de envelhecimento de leveduras. “A partir daquele estudo em células in vitro resolvemos testar a estratégia em animais”, disse.

O objetivo da pesquisa foi mimetizar os efeitos de uma dieta de restrição de calorias para diminuir o aproveitamento energético, mas sem reduzir a quantidade de comida ingerida.

“Assim como os humanos, os camundongos tendem a engordar quando envelhecem. Os que foram tratados com o dinitrofenol, no entanto, ganharam menos peso à medida que envelheciam, apesar de comerem a mesma quantidade do que os outros”, afirmou.

O ganho de peso, segundo a pesquisadora, está associado ao aumento dos níveis de glicemia, triglicérides e insulina, características da síndrome metabólica. “Nos camundongos submetidos à estratégia todos esses indicadores estavam diminuídos.”


Lesões por radicais livres

Segundo a professora do Departamento de Bioquímica da USP, o estudo não pretende sugerir o dinitrofenol como opção terapêutica, devido a seus efeitos tóxicos. “A idéia foi demonstrar que a manipulação das funções da mitocôndria é muito eficaz para controlar o envelhecimento e o ganho de peso”, disse.

O estudo demonstrou também que a estratégia é eficiente para diminuir as lesões provocadas por radicais livres – outra das causas do envelhecimento.

“À medida que envelhecemos, acumulamos lesões por radicais livres nas moléculas. Sabemos que a restrição calórica diminui a geração de radicais livres na mitocôndria, diminuindo também essas lesões. Comprovamos que o tratamento com o dinitrofenol também é eficiente para diminuí-las, configurando uma estratégia antioxidante muito mais eficaz que o uso de vitaminas, por exemplo”, disse.

Um dos objetivos do grupo, a partir de agora, é modificar o dinitrofenol para gerar novas drogas que possam ser utilizadas para o desacoplamento mitocondrial.

“Outra possibilidade é ativar vias naturais de desacoplamento presente nas mitocôndrias, como os canais para potássio, ou certas proteínas desacopladoras. Uma droga que ativasse essas vias seria muito interessante para promover, sem depender de nenhuma proteína, os efeitos que conseguimos produzir quimicamente”, destacou.

Alicia salienta que a FAPESP acaba de aprovar novo pedido de bolsa de pós-doutorado para o Projeto Temático que coordena, de modo a dar continuidade a essa linha de pesquisa. “Estou selecionando candidatos. Além de continuar essa pesquisa aplicada, com fins farmacêuticos, queremos estudar os mecanismos e os processos celulares envolvidos no envelhecimento”, disse.

Para ler o artigo Mild mitochondrial uncoupling in mice affects energy metabolism, redox balance and longevity, de Alicia Kowaltowski e outros, publicado na Aging Cell, clique aqui

Supernova

:: Agência FAPESP - Divulgando a cultura científica ::

Prestes a explodir


13/06/2008

Agência FAPESP – Um grupo internacional de astrofísicos detectou a onda de radiação ultravioleta emitida por uma estrela supergigante vermelha prestes a explodir.

O registro foi conseguido momentos antes de a onda de choque provocada pelo colapso do núcleo da estrela atingir a superfície e ejetar violentamente o envelope estelar (que cobre a estrela). Essa fase única da formação de uma supernova, conhecida como erupção de choque, foi capturada por meio do telescópio espacial em ultravioleta Galex.

O estudo, coordenado por Kevin Schawinski, do Departamento de Física da Universidade de Oxford, no Reino Unido, foi publicado nesta quarta-feira (12/6) na edição on-line da revista Science. Participaram também cientistas da Alemanha, Canadá, França e Coréia do Sul.

Estrelas massivas enfrentam mortes violentas com o fim do estoque de combustível nuclear em seus núcleos, o que resulta em um colapso catastrófico que forma uma supernova.

“As mortes explosivas de estrelas massivas são eventos dramáticos que semeiam o Universo com elementos pesados e produzem buracos negros, pulsares e as mais energéticas explosões de raios gama. A energia resultante desse processo pode regular o crescimento de galáxias”, destacaram os autores.

O novo estudo, da supernova SNLS-04D2dc, revela uma onda de radiação ultravioleta que se manifestou antes da onda de choque, aquecendo a superfície da estrela à medida que essa começou a expandir. Os dados da radiação indicam que a estrela que formou a supernova era uma supergigante vermelha.

A observação inédita pode ajudar a ciência a entender melhor a estrutura interna e a física de estrelas massivas que entram em colapso, uma vez que os dados existentes de tal fenômeno se referem a episódios ocorridos dias após as explosões estelares.

“As observações fornecem uma nova maneira de investigar a física de supernovas geradas a partir do colapso de núcleos e das estruturas internas de suas estrelas progenitoras”, afirmaram os autores do estudo.

O artigo Supernova shock breakout from a red supergiant, de Kevin Schawinski e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Science em www.sciencexpress.org.

Os Andes e a Teoria da Delaminação

:: Agência FAPESP - Divulgando a cultura científica ::

Fase de crescimento


06/06/2008

Agência FAPESP – Os Andes podem não ter se formado gradualmente como sugeriam as teorias tectônicas predominantes. De acordo com um estudo realizado por pesquisadores norte-americanos, a segunda maior cadeia de montanhas do planeta irrompeu abruptamente, dobrando de tamanho durante um curto período geológico, de 2 milhões a 4 milhões de anos.

O estudo, coordenado por Carmala Garzione, professora de geologia da Universidade de Rochester, teve seus resultados publicados na edição atual da revista Science. De acordo com a pesquisadora, com a descoberta a teoria da tectônica de placas precisará ser substancialmente modificada para incluir um processo conhecido como “delaminação”.

O método tradicional para avaliar o crescimento de montanhas consiste em estudar a história das dobras e falhas na crosta terrestre. Sob esse paradigma, os geólogos estimavam que os Andes teriam crescido gradualmente ao longo dos últimos 40 milhões de anos.

Carmala e sua equipe utilizaram técnicas desenvolvidas recentemente para medir como as precipitações e a temperatura da superfície alteram a composição química do solo de uma montanha. Estudando as bacias sedimentares dos Andes, a equipe conseguiu determinar quando e em que altitude esses sedimentos foram depositados.

Os registros de mudanças de altitude mostram que os Andes cresceram lentamente por dezenas de milhões de anos mas subitamente aumentaram muito mais rapidamente entre 10 milhões e 6 milhões de anos atrás.

O trabalho de um dos orientandos de pós-doutorado de Carmala, Gregory Hoke, corrobora a teoria do crescimento rápido e mostra que não apenas as montanhas, mas uma ampla região de mais de 560 quilômetros de largura teria se elevado em grau semelhante ao dos Andes.

Em uma pesquisa que será publicada em breve na revista Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Hoke descreve essas descobertas sobre como os rios entalharam profundos desfiladeiros nos flancos dos Andes enquanto a extensão da montanha aumentava.

Datando as incisões e mapeando a profundidade e extensão dos desfiladeiros, Hoke demonstra que a elevação superficial ocorrida na bacia sedimentar em que Carmala fez seus estudos provavelmente ocorreu em toda a largura da cordilheira dos Andes.

Carmala e sua equipe verificaram que, associadas às suas descobertas, uma ampla gama de indicadores geológicos – incluindo a história das dobras, falhas, erosão, erupções vulcânicas e acúmulos de sedimentos – sugere a provável ação de um processo de “delaminação”, que vem sendo intensamente debatido pela comunidade científica.

Embora a “delaminação” tenha sido proposta há décadas, Carmala afirma que o processo gera controvérsias, uma vez que os modelos mecânicos de construção de montanhas não conseguem reproduzi-lo e, até então, havia uma falta de dados sobre a elevação de cadeias montanhosas.

Quando as placas oceânicas e continentais se encontram, os geólogos estimam que a crosta continental envergue. Na superfície, o envergamento se manifesta como uma cadeia de montanhas que se ergue, mas abaixo da crosta o envergamento gera uma “raiz” pesada e de alta densidade que puxa a crosta para baixo como uma âncora.

A teoria tectônica convencional defende que a convecção do manto fluido do fundo da Terra causa vagarosamente uma erosão dessa pesada raiz, como um manancial desgastando uma rocha, permitindo que as montanhas gradualmente cresçam, ao passo que a crosta se torna mais curta e grossa.

No entanto, de acordo com Carmala, a teoria da delaminação sugere que, em vez de erodir lentamente, a raiz se aquece e escoa para baixo, até que abruptamente se rompe e afunda no fluido quente do manto. As montanhas acima, repentinamente livres do peso da raiz, disparam e, no caso dos Andes, se elevaram de uma altura de menos de dois quilômetros para cerca de quatro quilômetros em menos de quatro milhões de anos.

Algumas das principais implicações da elevação rápida de cadeias de montanhas são seus efeitos no clima e na evolução da região, segundo Carmala. A pesquisadora estuda agora, com um grupo de palentologistas, como a elevação rápida dos Andes afetou o clima e a diversidade da fauna no continente no fim do Mioceno, período em que a cordilheira se formou.

O artigo Rise of the Andes, de Carmala Garzione e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Science em www.sciencemag.org.

Escultor Paul Sietsema

Paul Sietsema goes the old-fashioned way - Los Angeles Times

Paul Sietsema goes the old-fashioned way


ATTENTION TO DETAIL: "When I’m putting a project together, it’s slowly evolving on its own in my head," says Paul Sietsema, in his Silverlake studio.

For the conceptual sculptor, fabricating objects like crusty coins and cracked jars by hand is arduous, not tedious.

By Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2008


In the early 1990s, when Paul Sietsema was figuring out what sort of artist he might be, he picked up crushed cigarette packs and other castoffs on the sidewalks of San Francisco, made meticulous facsimiles of them and put his creations where he found the originals.

"I liked having a show along a sidewalk with something that I had invested in, but that nobody would notice," he says, leaning out of a chair that occupies one of the few uncovered spots on the floor of his cluttered studio in a commercial district of Silver Lake. "Or if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They would have no idea why something like that would exist."

The 39-year-old artist has added layers of conceptual depth and technical complexity to his work since 1996, when he enrolled in UCLA's New Genres graduate program and began studying with Charles Ray, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy. And with solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and de Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam and works in the 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, not to mention an exhibition coming up next spring at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Sietsema's days as an anonymous stealth artist are over.

But his sensibility is what it was. Although he has evolved into a conceptual sculptor and filmmaker who explores the shifting nature of perception and photographic representation, he still turns out labor-intensive work that's steeped in mystery. Where he once replicated the ordinary stuff of today with considerable precision, he now fabricates "antiquities" that conjure up an obscure yesterday.

"It's supposed to be outside time," Sietsema, soft-spoken and intensely engaged with his work, says of his recent work. "I'm asserting something I've made that doesn't actually match anything else on the planet one-to-one. The way it's placed in time is completely ambiguous."

Sietsema grew up in Orange County and spent untold hours collecting butterflies and, by his account, "watching television way too much." He likes Los Angeles partly because it's easy to "check out" and concentrate on his work, he says, but he's strategically plugged into the international art scene. He's represented by L.A.'s prestigious Regen Projects, and his works are in collections of such institutions as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Curator Apsara DiQuinzio, who organized SFMoMA's "New Work: Paul Sietsema" -- an exhibition of a film and 20 objects that continues to June 22 -- calls his artistic universe "a layered world that fluctuates between historical periods, material phenomena, documentation and reverie."

The film "Figure 3" looks like an old-fashioned slide show of ancient artifacts, poorly photographed from books. Former art history students of a certain age are likely to find the images familiar, if only in a generic way. But these are not pictures of pictures of historical functional objects.

Using modern utilitarian materials favored by the Post-Minimalists, such as cement, printer's ink and string, Sietsema has fabricated a slew of "old" objects and selected a few -- cracked jars and bowls, pottery shards, crusty coins, a fishing net and harness straps -- for the film. Pictured from various angles, they seem to float in an equivocal time and place. But with the help of wall text and DiQuinzio's essay in the exhibition brochure, the artist has created a murky historical context for the filmed objects and some of the pieces on display, suggesting that they are remnants of some island culture that flourished before Western exploration and colonization.

Much is left to viewers' imaginations, but the display of 20 handmade objects offers clues to Sietsema's conceptual framework and painstaking craftsmanship. Sculptural "gourds," fashioned of cement and epoxy in a process that entails casting, breaking the cast artworks and putting them back together, are similar to the filmed jars. Drawings of barely legible pages of text come from a diary-like travelogue that the artist has concocted from writings by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, Belgian poet Henri Michaux, German art historian Wilhelm Worringer and other authors. One drawing, "The Famous Last Words," resembles a huge, slightly crumpled photographic negative. But Sietsema has fashioned it of ink on folded paper, using a hand-cut stencil for the text.

The workmanship is mind-boggling. But isn't it terribly tedious?

"Not to me," Sietsema says. "It's kind of nice work. You work with your hands; that's what I want to do. When I'm putting a project together, it's slowly evolving on its own in my head. So it's a way of occupying yourself, so that the ideas have a natural progression instead of being forced. I have given myself that freedom. My projects take a long time, three or four years. In 10 years, I have put out three projects. I don't know if I will continue to do that. But most of what's in the film is really fun stuff to make."

His work isn't easy to explain, though.

"I started with the artifacts and looking at island cultures," he says of the film. "You are struck by what people do with materials and how what they make is completely guided by available materials." But his version of the artifacts is equally grounded in Post-Minimalists' preference for nontraditional materials and the processes and visual effects of photography.

As for the travelogue, it's "a mishmash of things," he says. "I was looking at colonialist countries that were picking up objects from the islands. I was looking at colonialists and their relation to island culture in the 17th and 18th centuries as a way of thinking about photographic appropriation and that sort of thing -- as a metaphor for the appropriation of culture that destroys the culture or the creation of images and ideas that destroy the original." The invented story is also about ethnographers who journey to an island and become absorbed in its culture, he says.

All of which is a big change from the period when Sietsema arrived at UCLA determined to reproduce the two things he had to buy to move to L.A.: a pair of running shoes and a used car. The idea was to avoid making Modernist art objects and to work between the boundaries of art and functional objects.

"I think it cost me about $500 in materials to make shoes that sold for $60 at the time," he says. "It took me a month of pretty serious work. I worked the leather and nylon and sewed all the logos. The soles were made of different types of rubber I had to pour. I wore the shoes for a while, but they were very uncomfortable. The soles were way too heavy."

He gave up the notion of making a full-size car when he heard that Ray was planning a comparable project.

"It felt weird," Sietsema says, "thinking your ideas are original and then having your teachers doing similar things. Mine was different, but I ended up making a tiny version of my car, limited only by what my eyes and hands could do. I wasn't using a magnifier or anything like that. It's probably part of the reason I wear glasses now. For me, there was something about being able to put your car in your pocket. When I showed it in San Francisco, I put it in the glove compartment of my car and drove it up there." "I also did this performance thing where I cut my own hair and then glued it on my face as a beard as a way of creating the image of an artist, like Van Gogh or Brancusi," Sietsema says. "But then I heard that Eleanor Antin had cut a friend's hair and glued it on her face. There's nothing you can do that's original.

"There's a collective subconscious thing, where a lot of people are doing the same thing at the same time," he says. "That made me want to enter into a process that was a little more articulated, to have so many elements that it would be impossible to make a simple gesture that had been done before. I was finding myself, but also figuring out my work. I became embroiled in a long process to avoid repeating gestures. That's where the work I'm doing now comes from."

suzanne.muchnic

@latimes.com

Web Arte

Itaú Cultural / revista / www.arte

Por Thiago Rosenberg

Contemplar. Explorar. Interagir. Entreter-se. Perder-se. Incomodar-se. Deparar-se com uma obra de web art é estar sujeito a tudo isso - e muito mais. Mas, afinal, o que é web art?

Uma coisa é certa: não é a arte que se encontra na internet, é a arte feita para a internet. O artista da web, ou web-artista, não é aquele que se apropria da vastidão da rede para divulgar seus trabalhos, mas, sim, aquele que, consciente do potencial artístico do meio, o utiliza criativa e poeticamente. Usa a internet como o pintor usa a tela, como o cineasta usa a câmera.

Artista multimídia e professor do Departamento de Artes Plásticas da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA/USP), Gilbertto Prado evidencia essa diferença ao definir dois grupos distintos de sites de arte da world wide web: os sites de divulgação e os sites de realização de eventos ou trabalhos artísticos. Enquanto no primeiro grupo existem primordialmente referências a espaços expositivos ou obras concebidos originalmente para outros meios que não a internet - caso de páginas de museus ou de galerias -, no segundo há sites que se apresentam como a própria obra, concebida para a rede e inexistente sem ela - e é aí que se enquadra a web art.

O meio como mensagem
As linguagens, as ferramentas e os processos que caracterizam a internet são muitas vezes o mote dessas obras. São trabalhos auto-referenciais, metalingüísticos, que pensam criticamente o meio em que se inserem. Questionam, problematizam a internet. De acordo com Prado, "o desvio poético que o artista faz do meio: eis o centro da questão".

A navegabilidade na internet é um desses pontos questionados. Navegar é possível, mas nem sempre é necessário. "O meio possibilita a interação", diz Prado, "mas às vezes interessa mais ao artista torná-lo não-interativo, ou ao menos dificultar essa interação".

Riot, de Mark Napier: a navegabilidade da internet em questão | imagem: Screen shot da obra Riot, de Mark Napier

Projetos da dupla Jodi, formada pela holandesa Joan Heemskerk e pelo belga Dirk Paesmans, são exemplos clássicos. Em www.jodi.org, de 1995, os artistas transformam a linguagem de programação em linguagem artística, saturando as páginas do site com códigos que, para um visitante não inteirado do assunto, podem sugerir uma pane ou um vírus no sistema. Caso semelhante é o trabalho Riot, de 2000, com o qual o canadense Mark Napier propõe um navegador alternativo que, misturando em uma única janela textos, imagens e links de diversos sites, impede o usuário de prosseguir sua navegação.

Ao problematizar o meio, essas obras também problematizam o comportamento do usuário da web. O alemão Holger Friese, com Antworten, desenvolvido em parceria com Max Kossatz em 1997, faz esse usuário aguardar por uma chamada que nunca será feita. Os que acessam o site recebem um número de chamada, mas o número que está sendo atendido no momento não é em momento algum atualizado. Resta então a espera - sem fim - por uma conclusão. Já em Unendlich, fast..., de 1995, Friese coloca em pauta a dificuldade que o usuário pode ter para encontrar algo na imensidão da rede. É uma enorme página azul, com barras de rolagem na vertical e na horizontal, sem textos, sem links, sem nada - com exceção de alguns poucos caracteres isolados num canto da página, pequenas linhas e estrelas perdidas no espaço vazio.

Essa subversão do meio torna clara a diferença entre o web-artista e o webdesigner. Salvo exceções, podemos dizer que existe, por parte do segundo, uma preocupação em transmitir mensagens da maneira mais clara e direta possível, o que nem sempre ocorre com os artistas da web, mais preocupados em quebrar as expectativas do usuário.

Em contato com as outras artes
Não só da web trata a web art. Menos metalingüísticas, algumas obras se valem das possibilidades oferecidas pelo meio para propor narrativas ou discussões sobre as mais diversas questões. E, para tal, muitas vezes bebem nas fontes das outras expressões artísticas, como a literatura.

É o que ocorre, por exemplo, em Aleer - Antilogia Laboríntica, trabalho de 1997 do brasileiro André Vallias, designer gráfico, poeta e produtor de mídias interativas. Sua matéria-prima é a literatura, mas essa é rearranjada para a rede. Assim, textos de vários autores - de Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) a Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) - e poemas visuais do próprio Vallias são distribuídos em um labirinto virtual, repleto de links ocultos. Essa transposição da literatura para o meio virtual é mais explorada em O Livro Depois do Livro, espécie de biblioteca de obras de ciberliteratura idealizada por Giselle Beiguelman, artista da web e professora de pós-graduação em comunicação e semiótica da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC/SP).

O espaço virtual artístico
Contemplar uma obra de web art é uma experiência solitária? Em termos. Os apreciadores de cinema se reúnem nas salas de projeção; os que gostam de música ou de teatro se encontram nos espetáculos; os admiradores das artes plásticas se vêem nos museus. Para cada arte há o seu templo. No caso da web art, esse espaço não é físico, mas, se o artista assim quiser, existe.

Desertesejo, trabalho realizado em 1999 por Gilbertto Prado, permite que seus fruidores se encontrem na paisagem onírica criada pelo artista. O contato se dá por meio de avatares [representações virtuais do usuário], como ocorre, por exemplo, no Second Life - espécie de mundo virtual em três dimensões, aberto ao público desde 2003 e acessível pelo site http://secondlife.com. Mas as semelhanças entre esse serviço e obras como Desertesejo acabam por aí. "São propostas diferentes", diz Prado. "O Second Life é bem mais voltado à comunicação social, não é um 'projeto artístico'."

Presente em importantes mostras internacionais, como a Bienal de São Paulo e a Documenta de Kassel (na Alemanha), a web art parece extrapolar o espaço virtual e reunir - fisicamente - uma grande parcela do público interessado em artes. De acordo com Prado, esse crescente interesse pela arte da web se deve, principalmente, à sua extrema contemporaneidade. "É uma manifestação artística eminentemente contemporânea", diz ele. "Tanto no que diz respeito ao meio - intrínseco à vida contemporânea - quanto ao conteúdo."

Joe Goode, After The Fire

After the fire, Joe Goode finds a new passion - Los Angeles Times

POP ART
After the fire, Joe Goode finds a new passion
Artist Joe Goode with his dog, Pollack, at his studio in Los Angeles. Goode moved to a small town in Northern California years ago to paint -- much of his work was lost in a fire. His new show seeks to revive it.

Richard Hartog, Los Angeles Times

RISING FROM THE 'ASHES': Artist Joe Goode with his dog, Pollack, at his studio in Los Angeles. Goode moved to a small town in Northern California years ago to paint -- much of his work was lost in a fire. His new show seeks to revive it.


The artist was devastated when a fire destroyed his art studio. But then he found a digital camera in the damage and got some ideas.

By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 4, 2008
It was any artist's nightmare.

Painter Joe Goode and his wife, Hiromi Katayama, were sleeping in their Mar Vista home when their wolf-sized dog, Pollock, appeared at the foot of the bed, barking loudly. Pollock wouldn't stop until they stumbled out of bed, and followed him, half-asleep, into the small yard leading to Goode's painting studio.

What Goode recalls seeing that morning seemed unimaginable, unthinkable, impossible. Smoke poured from his studio. Flames licked through the skylights. Inside were more than 100 valuable artworks, representing 40 years of Goode's painting, as well as works by painters Ed Ruscha, Kenneth Price, Larry Bell and Ed Moses. "At first, I was kind of in shock," said Goode, a gray-haired, soft-spoken man with bright blue eyes and a thoughtful demeanor. "I didn't know what to do."


A Los Angeles Fire Department report called the blaze a "spontaneous combustion from oily rags." Goode called it a personal disaster. He stumbled around the charred studio for a couple of days, shaken. On the third day, he found his digital camera, deep in a drawer of a metal cabinet. He figured the camera was ruined. But he idly aimed it at the wreckage, and to his surprise, the shutter clicked, capturing the blackened studio walls, the ravaged paintings that hung like ghosts in their frames. The photos were spooky, intriguing.

That was in May 2005.

Goode took the images of his ravished life's work and began to paint over them. One wall-sized work, "Lost Painting, Fire," captures the inferno, with incendiary splashes of orange and yellow paint, and a superimposed photograph of a forest fire he shot long ago. The painting dominates Goode's new art exhibition, "Ashes," a collection at the DNJ Gallery that represents Goode's phoenix-like comeback.

"It's most people's worst fear," said Moses, a notoriously dapper 82-year-old hipster with a gray Vandyke, sitting in front of the painting at the opening earlier this month. "It's happened to a few artists. He lost paintings that were very valuable. Everybody could identify with it. But he took the residue and made it into something positive."

The feeling that Goode had overcome the insurmountable was the prevailing mood at the exhibition, which runs through May 24.The crowd, many of them close friends, came to pay homage to Goode's tenacity and resilience.

"He sure worked it out," said musician Ry Cooder, his tall frame cloaked in a comfortable brown fleece coat and loose black pants, a knit cap over his gray curls. "It's a fantastic improvisation.

"I was fascinated to see him improvise, given the circumstances," Cooder said. "He would have made a great jazz musician. A lot of people would have been devastated -- or worse. He's a tough man, Joe."

Creative sparks

There was a bizarre coincidence to the disaster. Goode was already working with images of fire when his studio burned. For years he photographed forest fires, awed by their power. In 2004, he was immersed in a series, "Burned Out," in which he photographed previous works, mounted the images on insulation boards and painted over them with oil, then used a blow torch to burn away some of the surface and create depth and shadow. Those 40 works were destroyed.

It's been almost three years since the fire, and Goode has had a chance to absorb his loss.

"Well, you either get up, or you don't, you know," said Goode, sitting on the floor of his rebuilt studio, his black-and-white brindle dog -- named for the painter Jackson Pollock -- at his feet. "I lost it. What's gone is gone."

Behind Goode and Pollock are three blown-up black-and-white photographs of twisting oak trees, the first shot in spring, the last in the winter and laden with snow -- the seasons of life. Goode will paint over them in acrylic, which he began using after the fire to avoid flammable solvents.

"Basically it gave me new life," he said of the fire. "I don't mean I'm glad it happened. But this was the beginning of a whole new body of work I'm immersed in. If I hadn't lost the paintings I lost, I wouldn't be doing the paintings I'm doing today. It evolved out of this."

Moving beyond "this" -- the fire, and its wreckage -- posed a psychological challenge.

"Honestly? The paintings that I lost, of my own, I had a way of dealing with that," Goode said. "But the paintings I lost of my friends', I had no way of dealing with."

Twenty or so of his friends showed up at the studio in the days after the fire to see what could be salvaged. "I went into the studio afterward, and it was gorgeous," Moses said. "Most people would look at it like a burned-out shell. An artist will look at it as a visual thing. They'll say, 'How can I capture this?' "

Eventually Goode got to that place -- with a little help from friends. Fellow artists donated works to an auction at Santa Monica Museum of Art to raise funds to rebuild. His studio is now a soaring skylit space with a second-story loft office whose balcony overlooks the studio and windows capture a sweeping view of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Still, new beginnings can be difficult, at any age.

Goode was born in 1937 in Oklahoma City, where he attended St. Francis of Assisi Catholic school with Ruscha, another Los Angeles artist. Ruscha still recalls seeing Goode's messy, unmade bed when he came to visit on Saturdays.

"Could he, or I, for that matter, have realized that decades later he would be making paintings of unmade beds?" Ruscha asked in a written appreciation of Goode's work distributed by the gallery. "Joe would laugh at the nobleness of a fried-egg sandwich, or even a telephone, and then, sometime in the future, would find himself painting pictures of these very things."

His exhibition of the work he made after he was, literally, burned out is laden with images -- the forest fires, floating steps, a memorable waterfall, a tornado, unmade beds -- suffused with personal meaning. The talismanic leitmotif suggests Goode possesses some secret of internal continuity that defies even the most catastrophic creative loss.

"For 40 years," Goode marvels, he has hung out with the same artist friends, gone to their shows once a month. "For 40 years," he repeats, marveling at the passage of time.

Goode came to Los Angeles in 1959 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. He lived in the Hollywood Hills, supporting himself with odd jobs, including a window-washing gig he got at a Venice party that led to one of his first key exhibitions.

"There was much less stress," in those days, Goode said. "It was certainly better for artists. There was a much smaller art scene. It was like a club. Everybody knew each other. There was much less emphasis on money. In the 1960s, there was nobody buying the art we made."

The work began a slow rise to prominence following a seminal 1962 exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, where Goode's work was shown along with works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Wayne Thiebaud and Ruscha -- an exhibition that helped put Pop Art on the map.

Since then Goode has incorporated conceptual and surreal elements, and become a well-established artist, represented in numerous collections -- LACMA, MOCA, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York.

Maybe a new start, with a new creative quest, is Goode's defiance of mortality. "I'm not so worried about whether my work will look like a Joe Goode," he said, petting Pollock. "I'm worried about seeing something I've never seen before."

anne-marie.oconnor@latimes.com

Um novo leilão de arte chinesa deixa incoerente narizes na sua esteira Por David Barboza Publicado em: 7 de maio de 2008 XANGAI - leilão Sotheby's house chamou-lhe a "mais importante colecção de arte contemporânea chinesa para nunca chegam ao mercado" - cerca de 200 obras de alguns dos nomes mais quentes da China. E quando o primeiro semestre do trove, chamado a Estella Collection, foi sobre o bloco, em abril, em Hong Kong, ele trouxe em US $ 18 milhões e definir preços para gravar alguns artistas, como a US $ 6 milhões para uma tela com o pintor chinês Zhang Xiaogang. Mas a venda das obras tem agitado indignação entre muitos dos artistas e os seus concessionários e alguns curadores. Esses artistas e curadores como dizer que a cobrança estava sendo formada, eles foram enganados em pensar que um rico ocidental foi reunir uma colecção permanente e acabaria por doar algumas das obras a liderança museus. Em vez disso, eles dizem, os compradores foram um grupo de investidores que rapidamente creditadas em vender as obras em agosto passado para o comerciante William Acquavella Manhattan, que é, por sua vez, vendendo-os através da Sotheby's. (A segunda metade da coleção está a ser leiloada esta queda, em Nova Iorque.) Alguns dos artistas dizem que vendeu as obras em Estella Coleção com desconto na crença de que a cobrança iria ganhar notoriedade de longo prazo e ajudar a aumentar as suas reputações. "Eu me sinto enganada", disse um dos artistas, Feng Zhengjie, 40, conhecido por seu gaudy retratos de moda, lushly nome de mulher. "Eu não posso acreditar que acabou por ficar como essa, só para um leilão." Michael Goedhuis, o New York revendedor que formou a coleção para o grupo de investidores, disse ele nunca enganou ninguém tinha esperado e seus investidores para as obras a realizar. "A história era a mesma para todos: trata-se de uma colecção é nossa intenção em manter intacta", disse o Sr. Goedhuis, que viajou para a China por mais de três anos, a fim de recolher os pedaços. "Houve uma mudança de orientação por diversas razões. Foi uma grande surpresa e foi para fora do meu controle. " Mr. Goedhuis recusou a identificar seus investidores, mas The New York Times já foi chamado duas: Ray Debbane, presidente da New York empresa de investimento Invus Financial Advisors, e Sacha Lainovic, uma co-fundador e sócio gerente em Invus. Nem o Sr. Debbane nem o Sr. Lainovic retornou telefonemas procurando comentário. Mr. Goedhuis disse que, em qualquer caso, os artistas não tinham qualquer razão de queixa, porque eles tinham beneficiado da exposição. "Eles estão pilotando a vaga", disse ele. Em uma declaração emitida na semana passada, reconheceu que a Sotheby's, no final semanas antes da venda que "se tornou consciente de que alguns artistas tinham vendido os seus trabalhos com uma expectativa diferente sobre o que iria acontecer com elas no futuro." Ele disse que esperava "A exposição internacional durante este tempo excitante no mercado seria útil para aumentar a sua carreira." Agravando a controvérsia, o leilão foi anunciado logo após as obras tinham sido expostos no Museu de Arte Moderna Louisiana em Humlebaek, Dinamarca, a partir de março a agosto do ano passado. Se tivessem conhecido o Estella Collection rapidamente seria vendido, a funcionários do museu dinamarquês disse, eles nunca teria organizou a exposição. "Nós lamentamos a sério que se viria a revelar-se mera especulação, e houve desonestidade", disse Anders Kold, o curador da mostra, intitulada "Made in China". "Nós não temos essa informação e, por isso, como consequência , Fomos a com ele. " Para manter a confiança pública e para garantir que eles não são utilizados como ferramentas no mercado, museus geralmente tentam evitar expor colecções privadas que estão a ser vendidos em breve. O show também viajou para o Museu Israel em Jerusalém, pouco antes do encerramento há abril leilão em Hong Kong. "No momento em que o museu fez acordos para a exposição, não houve indicação de qualquer intenção de vender a coleção,''o Museu Israel afirmou esta semana em um e-mail." O desenvolvimento deste museu aprendeu apenas até o final da apresentação.'' O conflito que sugere as tensões que surgiram entre artistas, curadores, galerias e museus de todo o mundo desde a arte florescente mercado se tornou global. Os desafios são particularmente graves quando se trata da China, que se tornou um ímã para algumas das maiores do mundo, galerias, museus, coleccionadores e arte mercado especuladores, mas é relativamente novo para o jogo. Os artistas chineses que eram há alguns anos trabalha vendendo por apenas US $ 10000 cada assinatura são subitamente internacional lida com galerias e vendo suas obras buscar US $ 500000 ou mais em leilão. Com efeito, Art Market Trends 2007 relatou que, no ano passado, 5 dos 10 artistas que vivem mais vendido em hasta pública nasceram na China, chefiada pelo Sr. Zhang, 50, cujas obras são vendidas para um total de US $ 56,8 milhões em leilão no ano passado. "É impressionante", disse Fabien Fryns, um dos fundadores da Galeria F2, em Pequim. "Penso que vai ser um US $ 20 milhões de pintura em breve algum tempo." Mr. Goedhuis, um antigo comerciante antiguidades, disse que no passado mês de Agosto da venda ao Sr. Acquavella era extremamente rentável para os seus investidores. Mas ele recusou a dizer o que paga para as obras ou o que vendeu para eles. Art. mercado peritos puseram a Acquavella aquisição em cerca de US $ 25 milhões. Sotheby's é uma das partes interessadas no leilão Estella Collection. Que a primeira metade da colheita tenha vendido para muito acima da estimativa sugere que o Sr. Acquavella e as lotas têm investido com prudência. O Sr. disse que o seu Goedhuis dos investidores "conceito original" foi o de "construir a pré-eminente chinês coleção de arte contemporânea como a base de um grande livro." Uma indicação da gravidade do projeto, disse ele, foi uma decisão de contratar Britta Erickson, um estudioso independente e de uma liderança competente em chinês arte contemporânea, para ajudar a selecionar obras e escrever redações para o livro, "Re China", que foi publicadas pela Louisiana Museum, na Dinamarca. Mas Ms. Erickson agora diz que ela era muito enganados ao pensar que ela estava trabalhando para uma grave, de longo prazo colecionador. "Eu pensava que era para ser uma coleção pessoal a ser montado para o longo prazo, talvez com algumas peças a serem doados a museus," ela disse em uma mensagem de e-mail. "Lamento eu estava mal informado." E acrescentou: "A arte mundo não pode funcionar sem confiança." O artista Ele Sen, 40, que pinta photographlike imagens de mulheres jovens, também disse que o Sr. Goedhuis ele tinha certeza de que um coleccionador de longo prazo foi atrás da Estella Recolha e que algumas das obras pode acabar em um museu. Ele disse que uma pintura que ele vendeu para a recolha de cerca de US $ 60000 passou para mais de 200000 dólares de Hong Kong em leilão. "Muitos artistas, incluindo eu, foi convencido por ele, deu a Michael nossos melhores trabalhos, alguns até mesmo a um preço relativamente barato," Mr. Ele disse que de Mr. Goedhuis. "Então ele viria a revelar-se um leilão. Sentimo-nos para fora vendida por ele. " Feng disse o Sr. suas obras foram leiloadas na Sotheby's de 5 a 10 vezes o preço que ele deu o Sr. Goedhuis. Mr. Goedhuis disse que, na viragem para o Sr. Acquavella, ele esperava que a tycoon casino Las Vegas Steve Wynn, um grande colecionador com interesses em Macau, uma das regiões administrativas especiais da China, que emerge como um comprador de toda a coleção . No final, ela comprou o Sr. Acquavella si próprio, sem restrições. Depois, ele colocou-o para o leilão. "Isso é o que eu faço", disse o Sr. Acquavella. "Eu comprar e vender." Mr. Goedhuis disse que ele tinha dado tentado convencer os artistas que a Estella Collection's foi uma breve história benéfico para eles. " 'Você só beneficiaram desta'", disse ele contou alguns dos artistas após o leilão foi anunciado no outono passado, e ele começou no terreno queixas. " 'Você está em um livro maravilhoso acadêmicos e você foi exibido em dois museus multa". " Ele também ofereceu sua própria crítica mordaz dos artistas, remarking que tinham beneficiado tanto a partir do boom que eles poderiam dar ao luxo de construir grandes estúdios e casas. "O problema é que toda a gente está comprando e lançando, e os artistas também estão lançando", disse ele por telefone a partir de Pequim. "É um faroeste aqui fora."

Some Contemporary Chinese Artists Are Angry About an April Auction at Sotheby’s - New York Times

By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: May 7, 2008

SHANGHAI — Sotheby’s auction house called it the “most important collection of contemporary Chinese art to ever come to market” — some 200 works by some of China’s hottest names.

And when the first half of the trove, called the Estella Collection, went on the block in April in Hong Kong, it brought in $18 million and set some record prices for artists, like $6 million for a canvas by the Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang.

But the sale of the works has stirred indignation among many of the artists and their dealers and some curators.

Those artists and curators say that as the collection was being formed, they were duped into thinking that a rich Westerner was putting together a permanent collection and would eventually donate some of the works to leading museums.

Instead, they say, the buyers were a group of investors who quickly cashed in by selling the works last August to the Manhattan dealer William Acquavella, who is in turn selling them through Sotheby’s. (The second half of the collection is to be auctioned this fall in New York.)

Some of the artists say they sold works in the Estella Collection at a discount in the belief that the collection would gain long-term renown and help enhance their reputations.

“I feel cheated,” said one of the artists, Feng Zhengjie, 40, known for his gaudy portraits of fashionable, lushly made-up women. “I can’t believe it ended up like that, just for an auction.”

Michael Goedhuis, the New York dealer who formed the collection for the group of investors, said he never misled anyone and had expected his investors to hold onto the works.

“The story was the same to everyone: this is a collection we intend on keeping intact,” said Mr. Goedhuis, who traveled to China for more than three years to collect the pieces. “There was a change of direction for various reasons. It was a big surprise and it was out of my control.”

Mr. Goedhuis declined to identify his investors, but The New York Times has already named two: Ray Debbane, president of the New York investment firm Invus Financial Advisors, and Sacha Lainovic, a co-founder and managing partner at Invus. Neither Mr. Debbane nor Mr. Lainovic returned telephone calls seeking comment.

Mr. Goedhuis said that in any case the artists had no reason to complain because they had benefited from the exposure. “They’re riding the wave,” he said.

In a statement issued last week, Sotheby’s acknowledged that in the final weeks before the sale it “became aware that a few artists had sold their works with a different expectation about what would happen to them in the future.” It said it hoped “the international exposure during this exciting time in the market would be helpful in furthering their careers.”

Aggravating the controversy, the auction was announced just after the works had been exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, from March to August of last year. Had they known the Estella Collection would quickly be sold, officials at the Danish museum said, they would never have organized the exhibition.

“We seriously regret that it turned out to be mere speculation, and there was dishonesty,” said Anders Kold, the curator of the show, titled “Made in China.” “We didn’t have that information, and so as a consequence, we went on with it.”

To retain the public trust and ensure that they are not used as marketing tools, museums generally try to avoid exhibiting private collections that are soon to be sold.

The show also traveled to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, closing there shortly before the April auction in Hong Kong. "At the time that the museum made arrangements for the exhibition, there was no indication of any intention to sell the collection,'' the Israel Museum said this week in an e-mail. "The museum learned of this development only toward the end of the showing.''

The conflict suggests the tensions that have arisen between artists, curators, galleries and museums around the world since the booming art market became global. The challenges are particularly acute when it comes to China, which has become a magnet for some of the world’s biggest galleries, museums, collectors and art market speculators, but is relatively new to the game.

Chinese artists who a few years ago were selling works for just $10,000 each are suddenly signing deals with international galleries and seeing their works fetch $500,000 or more at auction. Indeed, Art Market Trends 2007 reported that last year, 5 of the 10 best-selling living artists at auction were born in China, led by Mr. Zhang, 50, whose works sold for a total of $56.8 million at auction last year.

“It’s amazing,” said Fabien Fryns, a founder of F2 Gallery in Beijing. “I think there’ll be a $20 million painting some time soon.”

Mr. Goedhuis, a former antiques dealer, said that last August’s sale to Mr. Acquavella was hugely profitable for his investors. But he declined to say what they paid for the works or what they sold them for. Art market experts have put the Acquavella acquisition at around $25 million.

Sotheby’s is a stakeholder in the Estella Collection auction. That the first half of the collection has sold for far above the estimate suggests that Mr. Acquavella and the auction house have invested wisely.

Mr. Goedhuis said his investors’ “original concept” was to “build the pre-eminent collection of Chinese contemporary art as the basis of a great book.”

One indication of the seriousness of the project, he said, was a decision to hire Britta Erickson, an independent scholar and a leading authority on Chinese contemporary art, to help select works and write essays for the book, “China Onward,” which was published by the Louisiana Museum in Denmark.

But Ms. Erickson now says that she too was misled into thinking she was working for a serious, long-term collector.

“I believed that it was to be a personal collection being assembled for the long term, with perhaps some pieces to be donated to museums,” she said in an e-mail message. “I am sorry I was misinformed.”

She added, “The art world cannot function without trust.”

The artist He Sen, 40, who paints photographlike images of young women, also said that Mr. Goedhuis had assured him that a long-term collector was behind the Estella Collection and that some of the works might end up in a museum.

He said that one painting that he sold to the collection for about $60,000 went for more than $200,000 at the Hong Kong auction.

“Many artists, including me, were convinced by him, gave our best works to Michael, some even at a relatively cheap price,” Mr. He said of Mr. Goedhuis. “Then it turned out to be an auction. We feel sold out by him.”

Mr. Feng said his works were auctioned at Sotheby’s for 5 to 10 times the price he gave Mr. Goedhuis.

Mr. Goedhuis said that in turning to Mr. Acquavella, he had hoped that the Las Vegas casino tycoon Steve Wynn, a major collector with interests in Macao, one of China’s special administrative regions, would emerge as a buyer of the entire collection. In the end Mr. Acquavella bought it himself, without restrictions. Then he put it up for auction.

“That’s what I do,” Mr. Acquavella said. “I buy and sell.”

Mr. Goedhuis said he had since tried to convince the artists that the Estella Collection’s brief history was a boon to them.

“ ‘You only benefited from this,’ ” he said he told some of the artists after the auction was announced last fall, and he began fielding complaints. “ ‘You’re in a wonderful scholarly book and you’ve been exhibited in two fine museums.’ ”

He also offered his own scathing critique of the artists, remarking that they had profited so much from the boom that they could afford to build huge studios and homes.

“The problem is everyone is buying and flipping, and the artists are also flipping,” he said by telephone from Beijing. “It’s a Wild West out here.”

Gods and earthlings - Los Angeles Times

Gods and earthlings
The 'science of intelligent design' is science fiction.


By Richard Dawkins
April 18, 2008


If we were visited by aliens from a distant planet, would we fall on our knees and worship them as gods? The difficulty of getting here from even our nearest neighbor, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, constitutes a filter through which only beings with a technology so advanced as to be god-like (from our point of view) could pass. The capabilities and powers of our interstellar visitors would seem more magical to us than all the miracles of all the gods that have ever been imagined by priests or theologians, mullahs or rabbis, shamans or witch doctors.

Arthur C. Clarke, who died last month, said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If we could land a jumbo jet beside a medieval village, would we not be worshiped as gods? The technology of interstellar travel, and the scientific knowledge on which it would be based, are as far beyond us as our present-day knowledge surpasses that of Dark Age peasants. Parting the Red Sea -- or splitting the moon in two as Muhammad is alleged to have done -- would be child's play to those who command forces powerful enough to propel them from star to star.

But now the question arises: In what sense would the god-like aliens not be gods? Answer: In a very important sense. To deserve the name of God, a being would have to have designed more than just a jumbo jet or even a starship. He would have to have designed the universe. And therein lies a fundamental contradiction. Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex -- and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don't just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail. That is what "improbable" means, as creationists never tire of assuring us (they wrongly think Darwinian natural selection is a matter of chance).

In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things. Even if our species was created by space alien designers, those designers themselves would have to have arisen from simpler antecedents -- so they can't be an ultimate explanation for anything. No matter how god-like our interstellar aliens may be, and no matter how vast and wonderful their starships, they cannot have designed the universe because, like human engineers and all complex things, they are late arrivals in it.

Intelligent design "theorists" (a misnomer, for they have no theory) often use the alien scenario to distance themselves from old-style creationists: "For all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space." This attempt to fend off accusations of unconstitutionally importing religion into science classes is lame and disingenuous. All the leading intelligent design spokesmen are devout, and, when talking to the faithful, they drop the science-fiction fig leaf and expose themselves as the fundamentalist creationists they truly are.

Nevertheless, despite their notorious dishonesty, I sometimes hand an olive branch to these people by pretending to take their "space aliens" political ploy seriously. Unrealistic as the space alien theory is, it constitutes intelligent design's best shot.

The distinguished molecular biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel advanced a version of the notion, probably tongue in cheek, called "Directed Panspermia." Life, they argued, could have been "seeded" on the early Earth by a spacecraft packed with bacteria. Maybe little cellular machines like the bacterial flagellar motor were designed by ingenious nano-technologists from Betelgeuse. But you still have to explain the prior existence of the Betelgeusians and how they became so advanced and god-like. Even if Betelgeusian life was, in turn, seeded by another rocket from Aldebaran 4 billion years earlier, eventually we have to terminate the regress.

We need a better explanation, such as evolution by natural selection or an equally workable account of the painstaking R&D that must underlie complex, statistically improbable things. Gods, if they are complex enough to be capable of designing anything, are, by virtue of their very complexity, not in a position to design themselves.

Theologians attempt two (mutually incompatible and pathetically inadequate) answers to this unanswerable point. Some say their God is not complex but simple. This obviously won't wash. No simple god could design bacterial flagellar motors or universes, let alone forgive sins or impregnate virgins. Presumably recognizing the justice of that, other theologians go to the opposite extreme. They admit that their god is complex but assert that he had no beginning: He was always there and always complex. But if you are going to resort to that facile cop-out, you might as well say flagellar motors were always there. You cannot have it both ways. Visitations from distant star systems are improbable enough to attract ridicule, not least from the advocates of intelligent design themselves. A creator god who had always existed would be far more improbable still.

This technique of arguing against a theory by setting up its most plausible version and dismissing it is commonly used in science and philosophy. The late, great evolutionist John Maynard Smith used it in his 1964 attack on the then-popular theory of "group selection." He set himself the task of devising the best possible argument for group selection. The details don't matter; he called it the Haystack Model. He then proceeded to show that the assumptions that the Haystack Model needed to make were highly unrealistic.

Everybody understood that this was an argument against group selection. Nobody twisted it to trumpet to the world, "See? Maynard Smith believes in Group Selection after all, and he thinks it happens in Haystacks, ho ho ho!" Creationists, by contrast, never miss a trick. When I have raised the science-fiction olive branch to try to argue against them, they have twisted it -- most recently in a movie scheduled to open this week -- in order to proclaim loudly, "Dawkins believes in intelligent design after all." Or "Dawkins believes in little green men in flying saucers." Or "Dawkins is a Raelian." It's called "lying for Jesus," and they are completely shameless.

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, is a professor at Oxford University. His most recent book is "The God Delusion."

17/04/2008

Elétron dividido por quatro

Agência FAPESP – Uma das unidades mais elementares conhecidas é a carga do elétron. Difícil imaginar algo mais básico, mas é justamente o que um novo estudo feito por cientistas israelenses acaba de demonstrar, e em valor inédito.

Em artigo publicado na edição desta quinta-feira (17/4) da revista Nature, o grupo do Departamento de Física da Matéria Condensada do Instituto de Ciências Weizmann observou a carga equivalente a um quarto à do elétron (que tem carga negativa de cerca de 1,6 multiplicado por 10 elevado a -19 coulombs).

No estudo foi utilizado o chamado Efeito Hall Quântico (EHQ), no qual elétrons são confinados em um sistema bidimensional e interagem fortemente uns com os outros. Pelo EHQ, os elétrons, presos em um plano e sujeitos a campos magnéticos muito fortes, percorrem apenas trajetórias quânticas previsíveis, o que representa uma valiosa oportunidade para pesquisas.

Até então apenas cargas fracionais ímpares do elétron haviam sido observadas, como um terço, um quinto ou um sétimo. Merav Dolev e equipe conseguiram observar a chamada “quasi-partícula” com um quarto da carga em uma estrutura semicondutora.

Tais partículas têm grande interesse para a ciência, uma vez que se estima que elas tenham as propriedades certas para permitir o desenvolvimento de computadores quânticos topológicos, muito mais capazes e velozes do que os atuais.

“Com cargas entre 0 e 1, essas quase-partículas obedecem a uma forma intermediária de estatística quântica que reside em algum ponto entre as duas formas conhecidas: as estatísticas de Fermi-Dirac e as de Bose-Einstein”, destacou Eduardo Fradkin, do Departamento de Física da Universidade de Illinois em Urbana-Champaign, em comentário sobre o estudo na mesma edição da revista.

As estatísticas de Fermi-Dirac, que se aplica aos sistemas conhecidos como férmions, incluem elétrons, nêutrons, quarks, neutrinos e átomos constituídos por números pares de partículas. As estatísticas de Bose-Einstein governam os bósons, átomos com números pares de constituintes, como os fótons, glúons e as ainda teóricas (não demonstradas) partículas Higgs.

O artigo Observation of a quarter of na electron charge at the v= 5/2 quantum Hall state, de Merav Dolev e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Nature em www.nature.com.

Fundamentos da educação

Por Alex Sander Alcântara
Agência
15/04/2008

FAPESP – Uma pesquisa, feita no campus de Ribeirão Preto da Universidade de São Paulo, investigou a associação entre comportamento e desempenho escolar entre meninos e meninas. O estudo indica como a qualidade das relações estabelecidas na escola de educação infantil pode afetar o aprendizado das crianças.

O trabalho avaliou o comportamento das meninas mais positivamente, ao passo que o desempenho escolar foi mais fortemente associado aos comportamentos interpessoais no grupo masculino. Para ambos os sexos, foram avaliados o comportamento – na relação com a tarefa, com os colegas e com o professor – e o desempenho a partir de sondagem de leitura e escrita.

Segundo a coordenadora do estudo, a professora Edna Maria Marturano, da Faculdade de Medicina, os resultados destacam uma clara associação entre a qualidade dos comportamentos interativos, avaliados pelo professor no fim do ano, e o desempenho em tarefas que envolvem noções básicas de leitura e escrita.

“Mas as associações encontradas não traduzem em si uma relação de causa e efeito. Interpretamos os resultados com base em autores que acompanharam as crianças desde o início até o fim do ano e observaram que a qualidade dos relacionamentos da criança no primeiro momento influenciava o desempenho posterior”, disse Edna à Agência FAPESP.

A pesquisa, que foi publicada na revista Psicologia em Estudo, foi desenvolvida em escolas públicas municipais do interior de São Paulo. Participaram 133 alunos, sendo 68 meninos e 65 meninas, de 5 a 7 anos de idade, e seus professores (sete mulheres e um homem). O trabalho é resultado da dissertação de mestrado da psicóloga Elaine Cristina Gardinal, sob orientação de Edna.

Os professores consideraram os meninos menos respeitosos, tolerantes e controladores no relacionamento com os colegas, mas mais agressivos. Nas atividades escolares, eles são vistos como menos ordeiros e aplicados, mas mais inquietos, salientes, desatentos, retraídos, confusos e descuidados.

Segundo Edna, o fato de a maioria dos professores ser do sexo feminino é uma variável que pode influenciar no resultado. “A pesquisa discute essa possibilidade. Professoras de crianças pequenas tendem a ignorar com mais freqüência os comportamentos inadequados das meninas, prestando mais atenção aos dos meninos. Elas respondem mais, e com mais atenção negativa, aos comportamentos dos meninos.”

“No entanto, não temos conhecimento de estudos comparativos mostrando que os professores homens agem ou agiriam de modo diferente. Eu mesma tive oportunidade de observar um professor de educação infantil que ignorava o choro das meninas e repreendia os meninos quando choravam, dizendo que ‘homem não chora’”, disse.

As autoras aplicaram três instrumentos para avaliar o comportamento, a capacidade intelectual e noções de leitura e escrita, respectivamente: Questionário para Caracterização do Desempenho e do Comportamento da Criança no Ambiente Escolar, Matrizes Progressivas de Raven e o método de Sondagem de Leitura e Escrita Inicial.

Elaine e Edna detectaram que meninos e meninas com melhores resultados em escrita e, principalmente, em leitura, foram avaliados como menos dependentes nos relacionamentos com o professor e com os colegas de classe. A dependência é apontada como prejudicial ao desempenho escolar das crianças na educação infantil.

“Dentre as possíveis interpretações podemos conjecturar, por exemplo, que uma criança mais dependente, pelo fato de tomar menos iniciativas, terá menos oportunidades de fazer descobertas, de enfrentar desafios, de buscar soluções por si mesma e de, portanto, aprender”, afirmou Edna.

Importância dos relacionamentos

Em relação ao relacionamento com os colegas, meninos mais agressivos, provocativos, desrespeitosos, intolerantes e explosivos tiveram desempenho mais fraco na sondagem de escrita e leitura.

As pesquisadoras ressaltam que o estudo tem algumas limitações, como ter sido baseado no julgamento de professores e no fato de ser um correlacional, não havendo, portanto, uma relação direta entre causa e efeito.

Segundo Edna Marturano, os resultados, ainda que estejam alinhados com a literatura internacional, estão longe de ser definitivos e precisam ser qualificados por meio de replicações sistemáticas que explorem fatores associados, como variáveis do contexto e de práticas pedagógicas.

“Consideramos como contribuição da pesquisa o fato de ela propiciar uma reflexão sobre a importância dos relacionamentos na educação infantil. Incluímos apenas alunos que estavam na escola há menos de um ano e que, portanto, tiveram de se adaptar a um ambiente estranho, com colegas e adultos desconhecidos”, disse.

“Sabe-se que problemas relacionais detectados nessa fase tendem a se perpetuar nos anos do ensino fundamental. Cabe, assim, ao professor da educação infantil a importante tarefa de ajudar a criança nessa adaptação e ele precisa ser capacitado para a tarefa, por meio de formação teórico-prática específica”, destacou.

Para ler o artigo Meninos e meninas na educação infantil: associação entre comportamento e desempenho, de Elaine Cristina Gardinal e Edna Maria Marturano, disponível na biblioteca on-line SciELO (Bireme/FAPESP).

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1413-73722007000300011&lng=pt&nrm=iso&tlng=pt

Gabeira is the super woman of surfing - Los Angeles Times

Gabeira is the super woman of surfing
After a turbulent childhood, the 21-year-old Brazilian is conquering the male-dominated world of big waves.
April 11 2008

A significant turning point for Maya Gabeira -- one of many in her turbulent life -- occurred Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 5., 2006.

She'd moved from Brazil to Hawaii and had become passionately addicted to surfing large waves.

"Waimea was the first huge wave I ever saw, and I just felt that was what I wanted to do for my life," she says.

She'd ridden Waimea Bay, but not during one of those epic swells, when Oahu's entire North Shore falls under a booming assault that separates men from boys and transforms virtually all women into spectators.

She arrived in time to witness a gigantic set of waves breaking clear across the bay, blitzing the paddling channel. This occurs only when wave faces surpass 50 feet.

Gabeira was terrified. But friends told her the closeout sets were 30 minutes apart, so off she hustled, eventually gaining the lineup, where she bobbed like a tiny cork astride her 10-foot-4 gun.

"I caught four waves in four hours," she boasts. "And one was my very best wave, and I remember when I came in I was so high. And I think I was high for like 10 days."

The striking Gabeira had, at 18, become a bona fide big-wave surfer. She went on to tackle Maverick's near Half Moon Bay and Dungeons off South Africa.

Last summer she graduated to the daredevil sport of tow surfing, where jet-skis and ropes are used to pull surfers onto larger and faster waves, with fellow Brazilian Carlos Burle as partner and mentor.

That led to a trip to Teahupoo in Tahiti, where she overcame a savage wipeout to conquer some of the most dangerous waves on earth.Tonight Gabeira, who turned 21 on Thursday, will be one of three women honored during the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards at the Grove of Anaheim. Gabeira is heavily favored to win the Women's Overall Performance award for the second consecutive year.

"She's shattered every barrier women's surfing has known when it comes to big waves," says Bill Sharp, director of the yearlong contest. "She routinely rides waves bigger than 99.9% of the men in the surfing world would ride."

And to think hers is a story that might not be told, were it not for a turbulent life as a child.

Her father, Fernando Paulo Nagle Gabeira, is a longtime Brazilian politician best-known for writing the 1979 book, "O que e isso companheiro?" or "What are you doing, comrade?"

It chronicles the armed resistance to the South American nation's military dictatorship and specifically the 1969 kidnapping of American ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick, by the revolutionary movement MR8, of which Gabeira was a member.

It became a popular English-language movie, "Four Days in September," and Gabeira, the daughter, says she cried while watching it. "He has always been an inspiration," she says of her father, now a Rio de Janeiro congressman running for governor.

Gabeira's mother, Yame Reis, is a renowned fashion designer.

Her parents divorced when she was 11, leaving her angry and depressed. "That's the worst time," she says, "because you're not young enough to not notice it, and not old enough to be able to manage it."She struggled in school and argued often with her mother, then moved in with her father, who was away often because of his career. Gabeira lacked enthusiasm and direction, until giving surfing a try when she was 14. "It made me feel so happy and so stoked to be able to conquer something," she recalls.

The next year she was sent to Australia on a student-exchange program and discovered better waves and a surfing culture that embraced girls. She decided she'd move there after high school but moved instead to Hawaii, got a job as a waitress and discovered Waimea.

"My mom was against it and my dad was too, but he just wanted to see me happy," Gabeira recalls. "So I left and then they both realized, 'Wow, she's not coming back.' Nobody could visualize where I was headed."

So she surfed by day and worked by night. Bravado combined with beauty helped her land sponsorship deals with Red Bull and Billabong. A career was launched.

Last August she hooked up with Burle, a fellow Red Bull team rider, and new doors were open -- behind which lay snarling, spitting and potentially maiming beasts such as those that surfaced Nov. 1 at Teahupoo.

Burle was eyed suspiciously by some who believed, perhaps, he was leading a lamb to slaughter.

"What do you say about a woman going out there and doing it? I'd say women, men . . . at the end of the day we've all got a shot," says Laird Hamilton, a legendary waterman, non-judgmentally. "If you've got a calling to go and ride waves like that, then more power to you."

Teahupoo, like Waimea, has killed and seriously injured surfers. Its waves are not as towering but contain just as much water. Fast-moving swells are compressed into the reef. Long walls jack swiftly upward and heave lips that are frighteningly thick.

Barrels are literally round enough to fit a bus and those lips smash upon water only four to six feet deep.

"I was scared. Of course I was scared," Gabeira recalls.

Her first try was from behind a jet-ski driven by Raimana Van Bastolaer, a local legend. It was a large set wave, though, and Van Bastolaer, sensing his partner was too deep, tried to abort.

But Gabeira had already let go of the rope and was on the shoulder, and found herself too high on the face, getting sucked upward.

A ledge had formed in the face and she managed to air-drop onto her back, whereupon she was quickly sucked over like a clump of lifeless kelp and smashed anyway.

"I was just hoping for the best, and ready for the worst," says Hamilton, who raced to her rescue.

"You don't know what you're going to get, or if it's going to come up in chunks or in one piece."

Finally, she was able to tuck nicely into several blue barrels to further establish herself as a budding star in this male-dominated universe.

She's honored to be part of tonight's awards ceremony, she says, but her brown eyes sparkle and her smile widens when she reveals the real reason she's looking so happy.
"My mom is coming all the way from Brazil," she says. "She's going to be with me. I can't wait."

pete.thomas@latimes.com

Stephen Hawking na CalTech

Caltech crowd basks in Stephen Hawking radiation - Los Angeles Times

Caltech crowd basks in Stephen Hawking radiation
Stephen Hawking
Email Picture
John Raoux / Associated Press
LOOKING AHEAD: Any extraterrestrial colonies we develop need to become self-sufficient, Hawking said: “Only then will the future of the human race be safe from disasters on Earth.”
The celebrated physicist delivers a talk and answers questions before more than 2,000 admirers.
By John Johnson Jr., Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 12, 2008
Stephen Hawking is the last of the 20th century's celebrity scientists. As did Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan and a handful of others, he has the rare gift of being able not only to think deeply about the mysteries of the cosmos, but also to capture the imagination of the public with his ideas.

That celebrity was on full display Wednesday night, when more than 2,000 people, some of whom waited in line for hours in lawn chairs, showed up at the Caltech campus in Pasadena to hear him speak.

Related Stories
- 'God Particles: Poems' by Thomas Lux
- 'Physics of the Impossible' by Michio Kaku

Hawking, 66, delivered a prerecorded talk about black holes, sprinkled liberally with humor about his failure to win a Nobel Prize for his theory about Hawking radiation, a leakage of radiation from the massive gravity of a black hole.

At the end of his talk, he answered five questions submitted by Caltech students.

Hawking's close friend Kip Thorne, a Caltech physicist, described the painstaking process by which the British theoretician, who has Lou Gehrig's disease, programs his computer to speak for him.

According to Thorne, it took Hawking several days to program answers to the students' questions. "He is about the most patient, stubborn man I know," Thorne said.

Everyone depicts black holes as round objects, but are doughnut- or pretzel-shaped black holes possible?

One of the results I obtained when I was a [postdoctoral student] was that a black hole in four dimensions has to be round. There are no doughnut-shaped black holes in four dimensions. However, one of my former students found there could be doughnut-shaped black holes in five dimensions.

Given that any extraterrestrial colonies that we develop would likely be wholly dependent on Earth for support, do you think we should be involved in manned space exploration?

Any extraterrestrial colonies we establish will depend on Earth for support at first. However, the aim should be to make them self-sustaining before too long. Only then will the future of the human race be safe from disasters on Earth. It would certainly be necessary for the colonies to be self-sustaining as we go to other stellar systems. Just to send a message to Earth that more supplies were needed would take at least four years. And it would take hundreds or thousands of years to actually send the supplies.

Could the cosmic microwave background radiation be a form of Hawking radiation?

[The context to this question is Hawking's radical prediction in 1974 that black holes could emit thermal radiation, thereby allowing some black holes to ultimately shrink and disappear. The cosmic microwave background radiation is the remnant radiation left over from the Big Bang.]

In the slow inflationary scenario, the cosmic microwave background radiation is not Hawking radiation. However, the fluctuations in the microwave background detected by WMAP [a NASA spacecraft] can be regarded as Hawking radiation from the inflationary period. Thus, in a sense, Hawking radiation has already been observed. So maybe I should get a Nobel Prize.

According to general relativity, white holes, the opposite of black holes [and] which spew matter into the universe, can exist. But we've never found them. What would we see with our telescopes if we did?

When black holes are large, things fall in. But they give off very little Hawking radiation. So they are essentially black. But when they are very small, they radiate more than they accrete. So they are essentially white. Black and white holes are the same, just with different boundary conditions. If the boundary conditions are that particles are going in but nothing is coming out, we call it a black hole. On the other hand, if the boundary conditions are that particles are going out but nothing is coming in, we call it a white hole.

If black holes are created in the Large Hadron Collider, will we be in danger of getting eaten up by them?

[This question refers to the construction outside Geneva, Switzerland, of the world's most powerful collider, which is expected to begin operations this summer. Some skeptics fear it will generate such powerful energies that it could create mini-black holes.]

The LHC is absolutely safe.

There is no danger that collisions between particles at the LHC will cause a rip in space-time and destroy the universe.

Particles from collisions far greater than those in the LHC occur all the time in cosmic rays, but nothing terrible happens.

------

After his talk, Hawking was wheeled out of Beckman Auditorium to a standing ovation. He then took a victory lap in his wheelchair around the building, while the crowd snapped pictures and shouted: "We love you, Stephen."

john.johnson@latimes.com

'Phantom Sightings:

Art After the Chicano Movement'

Delilah Montoya, Juan Capistran and Ruben Ortiz Torres reflect on their work, the show and what it means to be a Chicano artist.

April 6, 2008

DELILAH MONTOYA
Born in Fort Worth, 1955
Lives and works in Houston and Albuquerque

AS a teenager in Omaha, I remember going to my high school teacher and very defiantly telling her, "I'm a Chicana artist!" She looked at me and said, "There's no such thing." So I was going to prove to her that yes there is. Later when I entered the academic world and tried to find Chicano art, I was coming up really empty-handed. I found that we were in the process of inventing ourselves. So my art had a lot to do with the self-inventive nature of the Chicano Movement.

I always feel like I'm still emerging, like I'm just breaking out of the gate somehow. It has to do with the way creativity works. You always have to question yourself and the things around you. It keeps you on the edge of always trying to understand.

What is occurring now is that we're getting this new [immigrant] generation that is bringing more
life into the culture. They're re-Hispanicizing us. It's our otro yo [other self] that is coming to join us. That means the culture is always changing; it's a living culture.


JUAN CAPISTRAN
Born in Guadalajara, 1976
Lives and works in Los Angeles

Ipersonally have never called myself Chicano, which to me was like a dated term. It seemed to be something that happened in the '60s and '70s but didn't have anything to do with me because of where I was growing up and how I grew up. It just seemed like something far away from me. I grew up in South-Central L.A., pretty much around African Americans, and I had an affinity toward black culture as opposed to my own culture. My parents are a traditional Mexican family, but I gravitated toward other cultures just to find my place here.

A lot of my work references popular forms of music, and subcultures that surround music. I'm also a DJ, so I'm interested in the art of remixing or appropriation. The music allows me to have these multiple points of view, where I'm not tied down to one singular identity. It kind of opens up the dialogue.

Being in this show is like a homecoming. I've had more success outside of L.A., so it's always good to be part of a big historical show in your hometown.


RUBÉN ORTIZ TORRES
Born in Mexico City, 1964
Lives and works in Los Angeles

WE navigate treacherous waters because there seems to be this binary model where you have, on the one hand, international globalized art and, on the other, a regionally specific notion of what art and culture could be. Artists have been forced to choose one or the other. Either you participate in the art world and show in fancy galleries, or you show in the community and represent where you're coming from. But there's a new generation of artists who refuse to play that game. They want to have it both ways. We want to be international but we want to be local as well.

"Art After the Chicano Movement" is not negating the Chicano movement. It reaffirms it, but it wants to engage those issues with the notion of art at large. We're not trying to choose between one position or the other, but somehow negotiate between both.

This show makes me feel part of a scene. I've never been so proud to be in a show with a bunch of my students. My hope is that it will break with stereotypes about the possibilities and limitations of artists of color, in particular Mexican and Mexican American artists.

--

Agustin Gurza

Um olhar sobre a arte moderna e contemporânea: Novas pesquisas, novas leituras

Agência FAPESP – “Mito e nação no modernismo brasileiro: A Amazônia de Maria Martins” será o tema central do ciclo de palestras

Um Olhar sobre a Arte Moderna e Contemporânea: Novas pesquisas, novas leituras, que será realizado de 20 de março a 10 de abril na capital paulista.

Promovido pelo Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), o objetivo é examinar como ocorre, no modernismo brasileiro, a construção de uma imagem de nação a partir do recurso aos mitos amazônicos, passando por Mário de Andrade, Raul Bopp e Vicente do Rego Monteiro e centrando-se no caso de Maria Martins.

O evento será composto de quatro encontros, que abordarão os seguintes temas: “Maria Martins: escultura, escritura, cultura. A formação, as obras, as viagens” (20 de março), “O interesse pela Amazônia no início do século 20: de Euclides da Cunha a Mário de Andrade e Raul Bopp” (27 de março), “O interesse pelo primitivo no início do século 20 na Europa e no Brasil: do canibalismo à antropofagia” (3 de abril) e “A Amazônia de Vicente do Rego Monteiro: o desenho, a linearidade, a definição” (10 de abril).

Mais informações: ceema@usp.br ou telefone (11) 3091-3559

Mais gelo derretido

14/03/2008


Agência FAPESP
– O nível do mar em todo o mundo tem subido constantemente nos últimos 80 anos. Isso é o que se sabe. Agora, um novo estudo aponta que o impacto do derretimento de geleiras é ainda pior do que se suspeitava.

A pesquisa foi atrás de um indicador que não se havia levado em conta: o volume de água represada artificialmente. O resultado indica para uma influência ainda maior do aquecimento global no derretimento polar. O estudo foi publicado nesta quinta-feira (13/3) no site da revista Science.

A elevação total no nível do mar no último século se deveu principalmente à combinação da expansão em volume da água nos oceanos e do derretimento de gelo em glaciares na Antártica e na Groenlândia, os dois fatores promovidos pelo aquecimento global.

Subtrair o efeito da expansão termal do aumento observável no nível do mar deveria dar uma boa estimativa da taxa de derretimento do gelo, mas essa equação deixa de fora um fator importante: a quantidade de água aprisionada em reservatórios. O novo estudo fecha essa lacuna.

Benjamin Chao e colegas da Faculdade de Ciências da Terra da Universidade Central Nacional de Taiwan fizeram uma extensa análise do aprisionamento de água promovido pelo homem. Os cientistas calcularam o volume de água represado artificialmente desde 1900, em quase 30 mil reservatórios com capacidade nominal conhecida.

O resultado é o impressionante total de 10,8 mil quilômetros cúbicos, suficientes para reduzir a magnitude do nível global do mar em 3 centímetros.

Nos últimos 50 anos, pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial, quando aumentou grandemente o número de reservatórios, o estudo calculou a diminuição no nível global do mar em uma média de 0,55 milímetro por ano – estima-se que o aumento no nível global do mar tenha sido de cerca de 18 centímetros no século 20.

A conclusão é simples: se os reservatórios baixaram o nível do mar, a elevação promovida pelo derretimento de gelo no planeta foi maior do que se imaginava. Ou seja, o impacto do aquecimento global tem uma relevância ainda maior.

O artigo Impact of artificial reservoir water impoundment on global sea level, de Benjamin Chao e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Science em www.sciencemag.org.