Photos from the World Tobacco Sniffing Championship. // Airport security encounters man with suspicious penis. // “On July 19, 1957, five men stood below a 2 kiloton atomic test. A tape recorder was present to record their experience.” // Titan’s vortex. // A vending machine for every need. Including mashed potatoes and gravy. // Biology up close. // Handsome ‘bergs. // Painting Batman big. // When pensioners have guns. // Orang-utans master iPads. // The problems of relativistic baseball. // People and things rotating. // Comics out of context. // Cleavage hands. // Assorted title sequences. // The complete Black Narcissus (1947). 

Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, explains visual art: 

Art is really about ideas. It’s not about looking at things.

According to the Guardian, Mr Rugoff is “one of the most highly respected curators on the global contemporary art scene” and has “shaken up art audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring them to engage with the kind of puzzling, cerebral work that tends to put off all but the most dedicated of contemporary art aficionados.” Prior to his moving to the Hayward, we learn that Mr Rugoff “curated a survey of invisible art that included paintings rendered in evaporated water, a movie shot with a film-less camera, and a pedestal once occupied by Andy Warhol.” Such was the unspeakable daring of this invisible art venture, Mr Rugoff has seen fit to repeat it, daringly, at the Hayward. Now Londoners can gasp in wonder at Gianni Motti’s empty frames and Tom Friedman’s blank piece of paper, at which the artist supposedly stared for a very long time. If the colossal cleverness of it all is too much to endure, art lovers may wish to extend the premise by not being visible either.

Setting aside the gallery’s standard blather about “diverse aesthetic practices and concerns” and “using invisibility as a metaphor that relates to the… marginalisation of social groups,” one can’t help but feel that conceptual artists are in fact tragic figures, or tragicomic at least. By and large they’re the leftovers, the dregs. They’re the people who weren’t good enough to get a job in advertising. Having abandoned craft, aesthetics and mere looking at things – and with them, any sense of wonderment or joy – what’s left is typically hackneyed, desperate and gratingly self-conscious. And so, for instance, arch conceptualist Stefan Brüggemann - whose work allegedly “re-presents something which is absent” and “comments on the absence of conceptual art, because conceptual art no longer exists” – attempts to explode our brains with this: 

And of course this mighty conundrum: 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

New, Leftwing Physics Discovered.

“Passive overeating” is a global pandemic, so Guardianistas want the state to stop us eating.

Setting aside the surreal wording and overt authoritarianism, there’s something vaguely unpleasant about a group of richer people – say, left-leaning doctors, columnists and academics – demanding constraints and punitive taxes on proletarian food. Taxes and constraints that would leave themselves largely unaffected.

Terrorising Coffee Drinkers for the Greater Good. 

Guardian hearts Occupier. Said Occupier hearts smashing other people’s stuff. 

Prior to smashing windows and hitting police officers with 8 foot long steel pipes, the Occupiers had gathered at an anarchist book fair, where leaflets and workshops promised a softer, fairer, fluffier world. (“Indigenous solidarity event with Native Resistance Network.” “Equal rights for all species.” “Children welcome!”) In this temple of warrior poets and ostentatious empathy, the “activist and educator” Cindy Milstein cooed over Occupy’s “direct democracy and cooperation”: “This compelling and quirky, beautiful and at times messy experimentation has cracked open a window on history, affording us a rare chance to grow these uprisings into the new landscape of a caring, ecological, and egalitarian society.” Occupy, says Milstein, is all about “facilitating a conversation in hopes of better strategizing toward increasingly expansive forms of freedom.” Its participants, we learn, are “non-hierarchical and anti-oppression.” See, it’s all fluff and twinkles. It’s just that some of the twinklers like to wear masks and balaclavas – the universal symbol of friendliness and caring – while trying to shatter glass onto Starbucks customers.

Because Artists Are So Dangerous. 

Bettina Camilla Vestergaard creates “an uninhibited space for creative thought and action.” Radical grass-tearing ensues.

Decenter was, we’re told, a place for artists who longed to escape “the choking effects of the market,” and who wished to air their “radical and uncompromising thoughts,” thereby creating “a more humanely oriented society.” You see, these precious flowers are choked by the market, implying as it does a reciprocal arrangement with the rube footing the bill. A parasitic relationship, in which the taxpayer has no say and is essentially irrelevant, is much more liberating.

And remember,

Cows Dig Jazz. 

Now waste your afternoon in the greatest hits. 

Noting the approach of Cost of Government Day in the States, Jeff Goldstein offers the following:  

Come sundown on Sunday, you all are free of your 2012 obligations to the government. Which now takes 197 days out of your year. My advice: you begin telling every “progressive” and Democrat you know who tries to engage you or approach you or talk to you or ask something of you, that you’re now closed for business, and would they kindly piss off.

Our own Tax Freedom Day, when Britons start working for themselves rather than for the state, fell on May 29th. Which is to say, for 149 days of the year, every penny earned by the average UK resident will be taken by the government in tax. And,  

Tax Freedom Day only measures the money actually raised by the government in taxes, not the full amount it spends. The government borrows one pound for every four it raises in taxes, so if the full cost of government is considered the Cost of Government Day, this would fall on 23rd June.

So don’t start feeling all superior.

John Ellis and Charles Geshekter on academia’s growing political lockstep:

The slant is even now rapidly increasing. At Berkeley the 2004-5 imbalance in political affiliation for the most senior faculty (full professors) was 8.3-1, but for the next rank (associate professors) it was an overwhelming 30-1. And for the most junior level (assistant professors) the figure was almost exclusionary at 64-1. Assistant professors are the most recent hires, and associate professors the ones immediately preceding. These strongly suggest that the university of tomorrow will virtually exclude political or social perspectives that are not left of centre. Attempts to stop this trend, or even to draw attention to it, are dismissed as partisan. Campus liberals are too comfortable with the status quo to worry about a problem that seems to trouble only people unlike themselves. What will happen when the world of academia has finally taken an ideological shape completely unlike that of the world beyond the campus gates?

Readers who wish to see that lockstep in action – and how the lock-steppers respond to criticism – should revisit this nugget from the archives. And remember, these are caring, enlightened people building “friendly, progressive communities.” Just don’t dare to disagree with them.

Howie Carr on when racial exoticism misfires:  

But [Elizabeth] Warren’s real downfall was the total unravelling of her alleged Native American heritage. No one still believes she’s even 1/32 Cherokee, and her refusal to release her Ivy League employment records only seems to confirm that the blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman “checked the box” to jump-start her sputtering academic career in the mid-1980s. In the spring, when Warren was still clinging to her flimsy stories of “family lore,” she said she identified herself as Indian only because she “wanted to meet people like myself.” She also cited her Aunt Bee as pointing out that her father, Warren’s grandfather, had high cheekbones, “like all the Indians do.”

A couple of weeks ago, several Cherokee who had been most critical of Warren’s scam arrived in Massachusetts to confront her. A perfect opportunity for Liz to meet people like her. But she snubbed the real Indians, claiming they were part of a vast right-wing Cherokee conspiracy. The Native Americans couldn’t even arrange a powwow with one of Warren’s whitebread campaign staffers. Finally they returned home, and Twila Barnes, an indefatigable Cherokee genealogist, went back to her digging – and came up with the 1999 death certificate of Aunt Bee Veneck, who imparted the “family lore” to young Lizzy about her proud high-cheekbone heritage. The form offered as choices for race: Native American, white and black – and the family member who supplied that information listed Aunt Bee as white. That family member was Elizabeth Warren.

Oh, and this is the kind of comment that the Guardian deletes as objectionable. Because, you know, “facts are sacred.”

Update: 

And speaking of the Guardian, yesterday the paper saw fit to romanticise tube train vandals. Apparently the culprits are being artistic and individual, and freeing us from fear. With sledgehammers, spray cans and a repair bill of £10m. The author of the piece, Tom Oswald, tells us, 

I was 12, indestructible and wondering who I was when I first awoke to the adventure of graffiti train writing. It represented a chance to define myself. 

Because, obviously, that’s what trains and tube stations are for. Letting adolescents define themselves by making the place ugly, degraded and vaguely threatening. Even when those adolescents are well into their thirties and looking rather sad. But hey, don’t be so square. It’s a subculture, man. Though, as noted previously, I can’t help wondering how the Kings Place Massive would feel if similar graffiti were applied to the offices of the Guardian or the homes of its writers.

Feel free to add your own.