Midterm Elections Important for Science and Climate

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It seems like American politicians find it more difficult to do things that other countries are already doing, or have already done. Like how to transmit solar and other types of renewable energy. South Korea and other countries are doing it,  while our politicians fight about “affording it” and whether it’s even possible.

Solar and thermoelectric power transmission towers in South Korea

“Transmission towers carrying solar and thermoelectric power from the Korea South East Power Co. (KOSEP) plant are seen in Ansan, about 80 km (50 miles) west of Seoul, September 30, 2010.

South Korea’s technology giants are behind the pace in getting on the $35 billion global solar energy bandwagon, but are now making up for lost time, snapping up assets overseas.”

World Environment News.  The upcoming midterm election will be crucial for renewable energy.  We need to put people into the U.S. Congress who understand science, who understand the ramifications of climate change, and understand the huge importance of investing in renewable energy. Let’s keep the climate change deniers (aka the Tea Party candidates and many in the GOP) where they belong — on the fringes of society and not infiltrating our government with their anti-science viewpoints.

Vote accordingly this November.  Don’t sit this one out.

Sante Monachesi, futurist from Macerata

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Sante Monachesi

September 21 – October 24, 2010
Fondazione Roma Museo
Curated by Prof. Stefano Papetti and the Archivio Sante Monachesi
Catalog

La città marchigiana dove Sante Monachesi nacque nel 1910, Macerata, chiusa nel suo riserbo rinascimentale, appariva troppo angusta al giovane artista per soddisfare il suo desiderio di nuovo e il Futurismo sembrò allora rappresentare per lui l’occasione per evadere da quel mondo provinciale: la mostra allestita nell’estate del 1922 dal pittore Ivo Pannaggi presso il Convitto Nazionale era stata sufficiente ad innescare una bomba destinata a far deflagrare il sonnolento ambiente provinciale e la lettura del testo di Boccioni Pittura e Scultura Futurista fece il resto. Monachesi divenne futurista e lo fu per il resto dei suoi giorni: il capo storico del movimento futurista Filippo Tommaso Marinetti lo accolse a Roma e lo introdusse nel vivace laboratorio culturale dell’Urbe e Monachesi corrispose a quanti avevano creduto in lui creando sculture metalliche e dipinti di impronta futurista, pronto però già nel 1941 ad abbandonare quelle sperimentazioni per navigare verso altri lidi.

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The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918

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The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918

September 30, 2010 – January 2, 2011
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University*
Co-curated by Mark Antliff, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, and Vivien Greene, Curator of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

*Exhibit will travel:

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice [January 29 - May 15, 2011]
Tate Britain in London [June 14 - September 18, 2011]

“The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18″ is the first museum exhibition devoted to this Anglo-American movement to be presented in the United States or Italy. It is also the first to attempt to recreate the three Vorticist exhibitions mounted during World War I that served to define the group’s radical aesthetic for the public. An abstracted figurative style, combining machine-age forms and the energetic imagery suggested by a vortex, Vorticism emerged in London at a moment when the staid English art scene had been jolted by the advent of French Cubism and Italian Futurism. Absorbing elements from both, but also defining themselves against these foreign idioms, Vorticism was a short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that spanned the years of World War I (1914-1918).

This seminal exhibition is co-curated by Mark Antliff, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, and Vivien Greene, Curator of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The exhibition will showcase approximately 90 works (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs and related ephemera) by members of the Vorticist movement drawn from public and private collections throughout Europe and North America. Vorticism will introduce visitors to such artists as Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth and other members of the Vorticist group. The group took its name from “Vortex,” a term coined by the American expatriate literary great Ezra Pound in 1913, when describing the “maximum energy” he and his colleagues wished to instill among London’s literary and artistic avant-garde. The Vorticist painters created compositions activated by zigzagging, diagonal forms and—in contrast to the Cubists and Futurists—more fully embraced geometric, abstract imagery, while not abandoning three-dimensional space. They harnessed the language of abstraction to convey the industrial dynamism they associated with the “vortex” of the modern city.

Among historians of modernism, Vorticism has been traditionally treated as an insular British art movement. “The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18″ will overcome that myth by identifying the movement as a distinctly Anglo-American endeavor developed in 1914 as an avant-garde response to the impact of French Cubism and Italian Futurism on artists and writers in London and New York.

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‘Speed Limits’ to open in Miami

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Speed Limits

September 17, 2010 – February 20, 2011
Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach, FL
Curated by Jeffrey Schnapp

Exhibit was also on display in Toronto. See previously here.

Press Release:

Miami Beach, FL (August 6, 2010)—The Wolfsonian–Florida International University presents Speed Limits, an exhibition which explores the role of speed in modern life and celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Italian Futurism. In 1909, the “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” proclaimed that “the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.” A century later, as the tempo of life continues to accelerate, Speed Limits asks critical questions about the impact of speed on our daily lives. The exhibition, on view from September 17, 2010 through February 20, 2011, is co-organized by The Wolfsonian and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and is curated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, CCA Mellon senior fellow and professor at Stanford University.

“This exhibition reflects on the legacy of the Futurist movement’s celebration of speed, and moves beyond art and literature into the realms of material culture, the built environment, popular entertainment, and everyday life,” explains Marianne Lamonaca, The Wolfsonian’s associate director for curatorial affairs and education. “It also brings into focus some of the key issues that affect each of us in our daily lives, such as the ubiquity of portable communication devices and the proliferation of nutritionally deficient food.” To inaugurate the show, The Wolfsonian will organize a happening on September 16, 2010, and a formal event celebrating the museum’s fifteenth anniversary on November 11, 2010.

Speed Limits presents more than 200 works from the collections of The Wolfsonian and the CCA and features a variety of media, including posters, books, drawings, clocks, paintings, and video installations. Critical rather than commemorative in spirit, the exhibition explores a single Futurist theme from the standpoint of its contemporary legacies and probes the powers and limits of the modern era’s cult of speed in five key domains: circulation and transit; construction and the built environment; efficiency; the measurement and representation of rapid motion; and the mind/body relationship.

CIRCULATION AND TRANSIT

Multiple perceptions of traffic and its models are vital to an understanding of the city and society. The exhibition bears witness to the prevalent dream of an urban space with freely-flowing traffic, and illustrates the concept of the grid or network that governs the movement not only of objects and goods but also of information. This is juxtaposed with the breakdown of circulation—the traffic jam. The overcrowding of city streets is captured in a series of photographs taken by John Veltri in New York City in 1938 and in the print by Benton Spruance from 1937. Visual records are accompanied by archival documents and studies of transportation efficiency and accident patterns related to increasing speeds.

CONSTRUCTION AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Architecture is a motive force behind the speeding-up of life, reflected in the increasing efficiency of construction processes. The phenomenon is illustrated through photographic sequences capturing the erection of the Irving Trust Building (New York), the Eiffel Tower (Paris), and Rem Koolhaas’s China Central Television building (Beijing). The fast pace of construction of these and other buildings can be analyzed by studying dated sequential images. Prefabrication served as a major drive towards increasing construction efficiency, and is represented by various trade catalogs of homes and other building types, as well as photographs documenting their assembly.

EFFICIENCY

Examining how notions of efficient production evolved over time, the exhibition focuses on two types of space transformed by speed, one public and the other domestic: the office and the kitchen. Filing systems, processors, and office furniture play a central role making work spaces fast and efficient. A remarkable 1936 project by Josef Ehm features an electrically-powered mechanical classifier, allowing workers of the Central Social Institution in Prague to access large-scale card catalogs via mechanized desks on lifts. The exhibition also includes photographs by Balthazar Korab that capture the modernized workspaces of the 1960s, as well as studies of the productivity of workers and their equipment such as Frank B. Gilbreth’s films of American workers in the 1910s and ‘20s. Photographs of Christine Frederick show her testing and demonstrating kitchen efficiencies in the early 20th century, when electrification, new equipment and appliances, and a redesigned space increase the speed of domestic activities. Alongside commercial artifacts and documentation, the exhibition includes architects’ studies such as drawings by Le Corbusier analyzing kitchen dimensions.

THE MEASUREMENT AND REPRESENTATION OF RAPID MOTION

Addressing the cognitive challenges with which humanity is surrounded, the exhibition features material about information compression through strata of signs, signals and messages, or diagrams that reduce complex traffic data to a usable visual representation. Increasingly, humans are processing complex overlapping of information including time and related data. This growth is reflected in a collection of clocks illustrating the tempo of modern life, and the increasing sophistication and number of instruments and devices that measure motion: accelerometers, altimeters, odometers, speedometers.

Also presented are posters and graphics whose design captures the notion of speed in order to more effectively promote cars, tires, oils, and other products or services built celebrating new levels of speed.

THE MIND/BODY RELATIONSHIP

The exhibition suggests different ways in which acceleration is associated on the one hand with pleasure—ecstasy, the search for powerful sensations, and overstimulation—and on the other with exhaustion, risk, and injury. Representations of the body in motion include the transformation of the body itself into a speeding object, gymnastics and popular athleticism in the early 20th century, the current cult of the body, natural and artificial improvements in physical culture, stimulants and tranquilizers, and the remedies associated with stimulants. Among speed’s pharmaceutical avatars are caffeine, cocaine, amphetamines, and the active ingredients in energy drinks.

EXHIBITION CATALOG

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same title, edited by Schnapp and co-published by The Wolfsonian, the CCA, and Skira Editore, Milan. The catalog includes new essays by Timothy Alborn, Yve-Alain Bois, Edward Dimendberg, Maria Gough, Antonino Mastruzzo, Jeffrey L. Meikle, Pierre Niox, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Seltzer, and Anthony Vidler; an anthology of historical texts; the visual essay “Rush City” by Schnapp; and studies of the impact of speed on contemporary society. The 320-page catalog ($39) is available in The Dynamo Museum Shop. To purchase, contact paola@thewolf.fiu.edu or 305.535.2680.

The Wolfsonian thanks the following supporters for making this exhibition possible: James Woolems and Woolems Inc.; Rene Gonzalez Architects; the Funding Arts Network; Continental Airlines, the Official Airline of The Wolfsonian–FIU; The Wolfsonian–FIU Alliance; the Frances L. Wolfson Fund at Dade Community Foundation; and FPL FiberNet, a leading provider of fiber-optic solutions.

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Exhibition of Futurism opens in China

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Road of Futurism

September 9 – October 28, 2010
National Art Museum of China, Beijing

From September 8, 2010 to October 28, the National Art Museum of China is to launch a large-sized exhibition named “Road of Futurism”, to exhibit the quintessence of the Italian futurism with 250 pieces of excellent works. This is the first global art movement at the beginning of 20th century, and its idea has influenced all art creation fields profoundly and lastingly, such as visual arts, literature, film, music, theater, fashion, cooking, practical art, advertising design, and photography.

The special exhibition, jointly organized by the National Art Museum of China, City of Alexandria, and the Beijing Cultural Office of Italy, is to exhibit painting masterpieces, and other works like declaration, posters, books, photography, design and furniture of futurism representatives, such as Balla Giacomo and Carrà Carlo, on all sides at the National Art Museum of China for the first time.

The exhibited works lasted for a hundred years, to illustrate how contemporary artists elaborate the experiences and strategies of the futurism in the current environment after the “Futurist Manifesto” was issued in 1909.

City of Alexandria organized a similar exhibition last year, exhibiting the futurism collections of the city art museum.

This is a part of the exchange plan between the National Art Museum of China and City of Alexandria. In the coming China Culture Year in Italy, as an exchange exhibition, the National Art Museum of China is to hold a “Shadow Play” exhibition in City of Alexandria in 2010, to exhibit treasures of Shadow Arts collected by the National Art Museum of China.

“Italian Futurism Exhibition kicks off in Beijing”

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‘Toys of the Avant-Garde’ on display in Spain

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Fortunato Depero. Papagallo. 1917. Private collection, Rovereto (TN) © Fortunato Depero, VEGAP, Málaga 2010

Los juguetes de las vanguardias

October 4, 2010 – January 30, 2011
Museo Picasso de Málaga

Over four hundred works on display at Museo Picasso Malaga will illustrate early 20th-century artists’ interest in making children familiar with the shapes and ideas of modern art.

Pablo Picasso, Giacomo Balla, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fortunato Depero, Alexandra Exter, Paul Klee, El Lissitzky, Joan Miró, Edward Steichen, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Alexander Rodchenko and Joaquín Torres-García are among the more than one hundred artists and authors whose work will be shown. Play serves as the narrative thread for an exhibition that covers such diverse disciplines as art, literature, theatre, photography, graphic design and film.

Toys of the Avant-garde examines the hitherto little-explored relationship between art and teaching, in the numerous projects for children that appeared in Europe during this revolutionary period. Nowadays, they are seen as examples of the artistic and literary trends that were to set the course for art and design today.

It ends with an annexe that is a restaging of the exhibition organized by author Blaise Cendrars in Paris, in 1929. It will contain approximately two hundred works, including books, correspondence, photographs and posters for children, produced by Russian Avant-garde artists during the early years of the Soviet Revolution. It will also include the screening of the film Éclats de Cendrars, directed by the author’s grandson, Thomas Gilou.

The exhibition has been organized and produced by the Museo Picasso Málaga, and curated by Carlos Pérez, Head of Exhibitions at the Museo Valenciano de la Ilustración y la Modernidad (MuVIM), Valencia, and José Lebrero Stals, Artistic Director of the MPM. An international advisory panel of experts also collaborated on this project. They include Juan Bordes (sculptor, architect, teacher, author and member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; Cecilia Buzio de Torres (expert on Torres García); Luigi Cavadini (Director of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone); Françoise Lévèque (conservator of the Historical Holdings of the Bibliothèque de L’Heure Joyeuse, Paris); Iva Knobloch (conservator at the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague) and art historian and linguist Medea Höch, from Zürich.

Two editions of an illustrated book will be published to coincide with the exhibition, in Spanish and English, respectively. The book will contain essays by the curators and the experts mentioned above, as well as pictures of the exhibits.

Artdaily

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Futurist Concert and Dinner in Rovereto (Sept. 30)

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Concert for 16 Futuristic Intonarumori (Noise Intoners) EP

MART, Rovereto
September 30, 2010
6:00pm

T.R.I.O. Trento Risuona Improvisation Orchestra del Conservatorio di musica Bonporti di Trento

Luciano Chessa conductor

In 2009, RoseLee Goldberg, the director of the Performa Festival in New York, asked Italian composer Luciano Chessa to recreate a set of 16 intonarumori noise intoners basing the design on the originals created by Italian Futuristic painter and composer Luigi Russolo. A group of contemporary composers including Mike Patton, Blixa Bargeld, Ellen Fullman, Elliott Sharp, Pauline Oliveros, Ulrich Krieger and Luciano Chessa himself wrote works especially for these instruments that were then performed under Luciano Chessa’s baton. Transart brings the project to Europe for the first time, to Rovereto, and has also given commissions for compositions to Margareth Kammerer and Teho Teardo. The tradition lives on!

Futurist Banquet

8:00 p.m.
Casa d’arte futurista Depero

The spirit of Futurism lives again to the sounds of intonarumori at a special dinner held in the Casa Depero museum.

Curated by Silvano Faggioni and Sergio Coletti . Chef Marco Brink

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Taxation and Recession

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On October 23, 2009, I wrote that if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire at the end of 2010, the US would experience another recession.  That ultimatum is now squarely facing the US economy, and I have a few assorted thoughts on some major areas that are being under-discussed. 


a) I find it revealing that leftists are quick to parrot some memorized garbage about why taxes should rise back to what they were during the Clinton era, yet the same leftists have no interest in returning to the spending levels of the Clinton era.  I am perfectly fine with returning to Clinton-era tax brackets if we also return to Clinton-era spending.  Any takers?  Come on, any takers? 


(crickets chirping as leftists flee to avoid having to address the contradiction between wanting Clinton-era tax levels but not Clinton-era spending levels). 


How+much+did+the+Iraq+war+cost If cornered, a leftist will change the subject and say that the Iraq War is the reason spending is high (note that this does not address the point of why they do not wish to return to Clinton-era spending levels).  However, contrary to leftist propaganda, the Iraq War actually cost less than the Obama stimulus, as per the chart below from the Washington Examiner.  In fact, exclude the Iraq War, and the budget deficit was all but erased by 2007.  At least the Iraq War was ultimately successful.  But from 2011 onwards, the deficit is set to widen further if the tax rates rise.  GDP will shrink below the current projections, causing tax revenue to shrink despite the higher rate of taxation.  Republicans winning a few seats in the 2010 Congressional election may halt the tax increase, but will not reduce spending, as Republicans are far too politically uncreative to overturn this increased spending. 


b) How a person feels about the capital gains tax is an intoxicating test of how true to free market principles a person is.  The fact that capital gains are far more concentrated among the wealthy than wage income is drives socialists into a crazed frenzy that will have them vehemently demanding that capital gains be taxed at 80% or more.  However, raising the tax rate of capital gains is the way to inflict the greatest economic damage for the least increase (in fact, often a decrease) in tax revenue.  This is simply because of the fact that capital is highly mobile.  Russia, China, and India all have long-term capital gains tax rates of 0%, and short term rates no higher than 15%.  By contrast, the US long term rate in states like New York and California currently approaches 25%, will rise to 30% with the expiry of the Bush tax cuts, and rise further to 34% under an Obamacare supplemental tax.  Capital, thus, finds a better climate in Russia, China, and India than in the US, and trillions of dollars have already departed from the US.  Who won the Cold War again?  Or rather, is that the wrong question, with the right question being "Where has the traveling disease of socialism migrated towards?". 


There should be no capital gains tax at all.  This is for the simple reason that if a person sells an appreciated asset, and then pays a capital gains tax, they no longer can buy back the same asset that they had just sold.  For those who screech about the 'rich' making too much, remember that taxing capital gains makes them invest less, which means they will employ fewer people.  Everyone is either employed by a rich person, or sells to people employed by a rich person, so punitive capital gains taxes always trickle down to people who are not rich. 


c) This brings us to the original question of a new recession in 2011.  Since the technical definition of a recession is quite limited, it is easy to concoct a 'stimulus' that pulls demand forward, causes a technical 'end' to the recession (in Q309 in the most recent case), and then is concluded by a lengthy hangover that comes perilously close to a new recession in its own right, discussed under the term of a 'double dip'.  All of this is a greatly distracted discussion.


EmployRecessionJuly2010 The most important measure of economic health, jobs, has not only not seen any recovery since the end of the prior recession in Q309, but is destined to languish through the end of 2011 and possibly much later.  This chart from Calculated Risk (click to enlarge) shows that only has the current recession been deeper than all others in the last 60 years, but it has kept jobs at a very low level for over a year.  Not only has this recession extended the vertical axis in this chart, but it is certainly destined to extend the horizontal axis as well (unless you believe that 8 million jobs will be created in the next 18 months).  So aside from mention of a 'double dip', this recession is already at least 3 times worse than the average post-war recession.  There is no chance of a full recovery to breakeven in the remaining 18 months of the existing horizontal axis of this chart, and it is improbable even by 2013, extending the employment recession to a full 6 years at least.  The Techno-sponge keeps liquidity lower than policy-makers realize it is, and a rise in tax rates could dry up what little trickle of job growth is currently being seen. 


d) Socialism is much more rigged in favor of the ultrawealthy than capitalism is.  This is because in capitalism, there is continuous churn in the ranks of the wealthy, and anyone can be displaced by a new technology or new business model.  Everyone has a chance to rise, and everyone at the top needs to continue to compete to stay in place. 


In socialism, however, only the ultrawealthy can afford to bypass the oppressive rules placed on everyone else (by hiring lawyers, bribing judges and government officials, etc.).  The ultrawealthy thus can erect a wall between them and the rest, and make it nearly impossible for an upper-middle-class person to become wealthy on the merit of innovation or business savvy.  Hence, any attempt to create a socialist utopia ends up making it easy for the ultrawealthy to build large moats around their incumbent positions. 


e) Let me also add a dash of gender psychology here, and explain why many men are capitalistic, while many women are socialistic.  As explained before, female hypergamy dictates that women are biologically driven to share their genes with only the best possible man, and women would rather share a top man with other women than have a lesser man all to themselves.  If it is clear that the men at the top will remain there (socialism), there is much less risk in the decision-making process for women.  In a capitalistic environment, the men at the top today may not be there in a decade, and there is a far riskier 'stockpicking' aspect to choosing which man's genes are going to have long-term value.  Thus is further complicated by the fact that a 'valuable' man in the past usually was so due to fighting skill and capacity for violence, while a 'valuable' man today is one with analytical/entrepreneurial skill, which was not easily monetized in the past.  But the human brain does not evolve as fast as it needs to, and if you wonder why a serial killer immediately gets love letters from a large number of women (including educated, married women), but the founders of Google and Facebook do not, this is why.  The serial killer has proven himself to be a 'valuable' man as per metrics women are evolved to respond to, that were determinants of male power, before modern society existed.  By appearing in the media for having been a serial killer, has received a resounding stamp of validation on his credentials, and is certified as an apex male. 


Along the same vein, women are also driven to extract resources from lesser men while cutting them off from the better things that society has to offer.  Thus, I find it necessary to mention that of all the socialist policies that are obstructing market forces and preventing job creation, organized misandry is a greatly overlooked one.  'Feminist' groups like NOW have lobbied for stimulus dollars to be diverted towards themselves, and away from areas where fewer women work (such as infrastructure and manufacturing).  Passage of the 2009 'stimulus' immediately led to an unprecedented chasm between male and female unemployment rates.  This sort of shameless vote-purchasing and disenfranchisement of men, zealously enacted by Democrats and almost as zealously condoned by whiteknighting Republicans, will prove to be very corrosive to the long-term economic health of the US economy.  This is where Republicans are fatally flawed - they completely fail to see how they themselves undermine their own goals.  I will have much more to say on this before election day. 


These five thoughts, though not quite related to each other, have been overlooked among the oceans of ink expended in commentary about the current malaise.  Perhaps we are on the brink of a breaking point, where government wastage will soon cause visible declines in quality of life, where overburdening productive workers (men in particular) causes a long overdue backlash, and where the little-understood technological deflation quickens in the absence of much-needed liquidity injections.  Let us see how far this unique blend of government incompetence and corruption can go.  


Related :


Eight Ways to Supercharge the US Economy

CleanGrow Introduces First-in-Kind Multi-Ion CNT-Based Sensor for Horticultural and Other Applications

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The product combines a carbon nanotube-based sensor with a multi-ion meter for on-site measurements and real-time feedback. Currently optimized for horticultural applications, the easy-to-use instrument is also a natural fit for other applications where existing sensor technology falls short of meeting complex measuring requirements.

Novel graphene amplifier is a major step from single devices to circuits

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So far, there have been no research reports on a graphene-based transistor amplifier and investigations of its in-field controllability for analog, mixed-signal, and radio-frequency applications. Previous work on graphene transistors has largely focused on frequency multiplication near the Dirac point in graphene current-voltage characteristic. But now, a team of researchers has demonstrated the first triple-mode graphene amplifier. They have shown experimentally that by leveraging the ambipolarity of charge transport in graphene, the amplifier can be configured in the common-source, common-drain, or frequency multiplication mode of operation by changing the gate bias. This is the first demonstration of a single-transistor amplifier that can be tuned between different modes of operation using a single three-terminal transistor. Moreover, during its operation, the graphene amplifier was configured in-field to switch between the different modes. The result marks another important step toward graphene applications in electronics.